“We’ve been conditioned to think that only politicians can solve our problems. But at some point, maybe we will wake-up and recognize that it was the politicians who created the problems.”
-Ben Carson
“Everyone knows there’s waste in government that should be cut, but DOGE is using a meat axe.”
-Senator Chuck Schumer
“President Trump is engaging in the most important restoration of democracy in over a century, by saying that we are going to restore power to the people through their ELECTED president and his appointed officers.”
“President Trump is cutting off the slush fund to the organizations that hate and hurt America.“
“USAID was a slush fund, first of all, for left wing projects around the globe, like gender surgeries around the world. Diversity, equity, inclusion policies, crazy Green New Deal climate scams, and every other lunatic left wing project that is bankrupting this country. But even beyond that, it was funding an army of left-wing activists, these NGOs, non-governmental organizations, NGOs.“
“If a district court judge wants control over the entire executive branch…he should run for president.”
-Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff
“We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well…we have inflation because the government is living too well.”
-President Ronald Reagan
“I am 100% certain that the magnitude of fraud in federal entitlements (Medicare. Social Security, Medicaid, Disability) exceeds the combined sum of every private fraud you’ve ever heard by FAR.“
-Elon Musk
“The Dems are trying to hide possibly the biggest fraud scheme in human history!”
-Elon Musk
“If cutting government funding shuts down an NGO, it is not, and never was a Non-Governmental Organization. Where’s the lie?”
-Congressman Thomas Massie
“States have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers, always guaranteeing the respect due to the dignity of each and every human person. Immigrants, moreover, have the duty to integrate into the host country, respecting its laws and its national identity.“
-Pope Benedict XVI
“You can’t get rich in politics unless you’re a crook.”
-President Harry S. Truman
Kill The Death Tax: The 60 Plus Association has been fighting to kill the Inheritance Tax, coined as the Death Tax, for years! This year could be the year!!!
Republicans have introduced the repeal of the federal inheritance tax and President Trump seems to be sympathetic to the concept.
Americans have paid taxes on those earnings, saved for their families and deserve to be allowed to pass on their family farms, small businesses, homesteads, and more to their families.
Let your Member of Congress know you support the repeal of the Death Tax.
Putin’s Russia Is A Terrorist State: Let’s remember who started this war by attacking its neighbor… after signing an international agreement pledging to protect/respect their borders.
Putin continues to bomb civilian targets, torture prisoners, sends wounded soldiers back to the front, kidnaps Ukrainian children, and commits other war crimes.
How can we believe Putin’s Russia wants peace while it continues to terrorize Kyiv and civilians with ballistic missiles, importing foreign fighters and ignoring international norms?
The world needs to unequivocally demand Russia respect international borders, stop attacking its neighbors, and live in peace… otherwise we need to continue to treat Putin’s Russia as it is…a terrorist state. Russia will ONLY understand peace through strength.
The free world should have the moral clarity to punish, not reward, the party that started the war and stand for the rule of law. Rewarding the invader sets a horrible precedent.
Democrats Claim “Constitutional Crisis”: Desperate rhetoric for a party that has lost touch with its voters. Voters want change. Voters want reform. Voters want lower taxes. Voters want transparency.
Voters elected Donald Trump to shake up the Washington swamp, and he’s doing just that.
Just because you don’t like the policy that doesn’t make it a Constitutional Crisis!
I reread the Constitution… no issues here. I’m not sure WHAT Constitution the Democrats are reading, but it’s NOT the U.S. Constitution.
No crisis…just common-sense policies and spending priorities. Exposing graft, bribes, kickbacks and slush fund funding is sending Democrats through the roof.
Activist, Democrat-appointed liberal judges are attempting to legislate from the bench. I suspect higher courts that want to uphold the separation of powers and limit judicial activism will overturn these politicized rulings.
“Trump is smart to let the judiciary fix its own mistakes…It’s going to take time and it’s going to be frustrating.” READ the article below on the Democrat’s “Puny Lawfare Offensive”…it’s worth the time.
Democrats are trying to “spin” a constitutional crisis because they are WRONG on the policy. I think taxpayers will see through their politics and we’ll get back to sanity.
Audit… close them down. Transparency will expose many, and they should be prosecuted for stealing and defrauding the American people. Taxpayers deserve no less.
DOGE vs DODGE: While President Trump and Elon’s DOGE Team find unbelievable government waste and potential criminal kickbacks and theft, the Democrats are in full “DODGE” mode.
The Democrats have gotten away with these games for years, and now a scary “audit” is sending them into the courts, onto mainstream media outlets, and into the streets to complain about fiscal responsibility… it’s YOUR tax dollars and YOUR children’s and grandchildren’s government debt obligations we’re talking about.
Why are the Democrats so afraid of finding government waste/fraud???
It’s NOT “free” money…it’s the taxpayer’s money.
Maybe they should rename DOGE – Democrats Officially Getting Exposed!
P.S. Thanks to Dawn for pointing out the “DODGE” the Democrats are engaged in!
USAID – Close it Down: USAID’s mismanaged spending abused that fact and jeopardized our foreign policy. The agency must be reformed… but can it?
It might make more sense to close it down and get rid of the waste, abuse, and fraud and then take the “good programs” and reinstitute them under the State Department with proper supervision and transparency.
Together…Let’s Remember Democrat’s Hypocrisy: before Trump….
– Democrats opposed illegal immigration
– Democrats suggested cutting 1/3 the size of government
– Democrats supported mass deportation
– Democrats supported voter integrity programs
– Democrats loved Obama’s and Biden’s Executive Orders Funny how that works?!?
How Our Government is Supposed to Work: Shared by Scott Taylor…
For the activist judges…
For the media… For the Democrats who need a little refresher…
Read more below and follow me on X & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
Saul’s News Weekly Rewind Video
This Week: Senator Thune & Rep Randy Feenstra team up to kill the Death Tax, Elon Musk says data shows 150 year-olds are collecting Social Security, and over 75,000 federal workers took the Trump buyout!
Inheritance tax hits chopping block as more than 200 Republicans push for repeal
House and Senate Republicans are pushing to repeal the federal ‘death tax’
Republican lawmakers are mounting a massive effort to repeal the federal inheritance tax, colloquially known as the “death tax.”
Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, is leading more than 170 House Republicans on the “Death Tax Repeal Act,” which is also backed by the House’s top tax writer, Ways & Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo.
An inheritance or estate tax is levied upon the beneficiary who receives assets upon a person’s death. Republicans have long criticized the estate tax as a needless financial burden on grieving families, particularly hitting small family-owned businesses.
It comes as Republicans work on extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, whose provisions expire at the end of this year. Among the measures sunsetting in 2026 is a doubling of the estate tax exemption.
Supporters of the federal estate tax point out that it affects a relatively small number of estates. Penalties are triggered for estates worth roughly $13.9 million at the time of death, according to the latest IRS data.
A counterpart bill in the Senate is being led by Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and is backed by 44 senators.
Both Feenstra and Thune argued it was an unnecessary tax that unfairly affected family farms and small businesses in their home states of Iowa, South Dakota and elsewhere.
We Are Totally Going to Crush the Democrats’ Puny Lawfare Offensive
Everybody needs to calm down and take a deep breath – the DOGE revolution is not in danger because a bunch of obscure district court judges in blue jurisdictions have signed ridiculous temporary orders purporting to limit President Donald Trump’s ability to actually be president. Don’t listen to the black pill battalion. We’re not losing this fight. We’re going to win it. Listen to the vice president – JD Vance has gotten a lot of heat because he pointed out that this is a legal farce. As usual, he’s right. And, to the extent there is a constitutional crisis – which there isn’t – it was brought on by uppity jurists hoping to distract the administration from its mission by embroiling it in a separation of powers fight. Except that’s not going to happen. The President and JD Vance are not going to fall for it. What they will do is use the judiciary to police its own misbehaving members, and when it’s all done, these legal fights will solidify the administration’s ability to act decisively in the future.
There are a few things non-lawyers need to understand. The first is that this nonsense will not stand. There are many reasons why, but the most important reason is that these emergency temporary restraining orders (and the injunctions that will likely follow) are legally meritless. Once a serious court gets a look at them, they will end up on the ash heap of judicial history.
The next thing to understand is that after this fight, Donald Trump will be more secure in his ability to be president than he has ever been. This kind of nationwide injunction will go extinct like the dinosaurs, passenger pigeons, and alternative pronouns in government correspondence. Why? The most obvious reason is that the orders are legally ridiculous, but the other key reason is that Chief Justice John Roberts is fully aware of the danger to his institution that this phenomenon poses.
We’re going to win this fight. We just have to fight smart.
The Biden economic hangover
Former President Joe Biden left a terrible legacy: the border catastrophe, chaos and disorder abroad, increased crime, oppressive wokeness. But for today’s purposes, consider the damage done by Biden’s economic policies.
Inflation took away 20% of people’s purchasing power in a short period of time. Even when the rate of inflation slowed, it is still, right now, rising faster than economists — or anybody else — are comfortable with. This week there will be new numbers for inflation in January, and the message again will be that Biden brought inflation on but was unable to fully get rid of it. Now that is President Donald Trump’s job.
Meanwhile, recent reports have brought word of what the New York Times called an “unusually large” downward revision in the number of jobs we thought were created in Biden’s final year, since March 2024. The bottom line is that about 600,000 fewer jobs were created in that period than we were told at the time through monthly jobs reports. “The Biden jobs market was way worse than markets thought,” Trump White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said recently. “There’s a lot of cleaning up to do.”
‘Black men love Trump’ dooms Democrats with 42% support: Poll
President Donald Trump has Democrats on the ropes with his surging support from African Americans, prompting a poll to declare that “black men love Trump.”
In a new Cygnal survey shared with Secrets, Trump has a shocking 42% approval rating from black men, a massive edge over any past Republican president.
Brock McCleary, Cygnal vice president of polling, told Secrets, “Forty-two percent of black men approving of Trump’s job so far is no small thing. Unlike Democrats’ approach previously, this isn’t about placation or offering new attractive policies with no follow-through. His popularity and approval surges because he does the things he says he’ll do — and that’s a breath of fresh air for everyone.”
McCleary, who polled for Trump in 2016 and Vivek Ramaswamy last year, added, “In the pre-Trump era, these numbers for a Republican would be aspirational rather than realistic. In the thicket of this new Trump era, these gains among black Americans are noteworthy and certainly beyond a threshold of statistical normality. It boils down to follow-through, which is the most elusive of traits for politicians.”
Democrats are getting trounced in the narrative war
It is a rule of thumb for political parties to emphasize popular positions while deemphasizing stances disfavored by the public. Politics ain’t beanbag, but it ain’t rocket science, either.
Democrats have been struggling with this lately.
Last week, the party and its legacy media allies were given ample opportunity to win a few news cycles, such as when President Donald Trump announced his desire to “take over” Gaza, offending both “America First” Republicans and pro-Palestinian progressives. Instead, they spent the week defending deeply unpopular ideas and emphasizing all the wrong news items.
The week began with Democrats blasting Trump’s executive order that banned biological males from competing in girls sports. The problem, of course, is that 79% of the public currently supports the measure, which is up 17 points since 2021. Even 67% of Democrats support the order. But prominent Democratic politicians and news outlets made it seem as if Trump had ordered a genocide.
An article on NPR titled “Trump’s anti-trans effort is an agenda cornerstone with echoes in history” compared the executive order to Germany in the 1930s.
Trump is not the radical — he’s simply undoing radical things Dems did
The greatest trick the Democrats ever pulled was convincing the world that conservatives were American politics’ aggressors.
But now they’ve run out of rope.
After President Trump signed an executive order compelling America’s schools to allow only women to compete in women’s sports, the usual suspects gnashed their teeth.
“Donald Trump signs a transgender sports ban that would affect less than 1% of student athletes,” sniped the left-wing website the Recount.
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson called the order “unlawful and cruel,” while his attorney general opted for “dehumanizing.”
NPR published a story about Trump “curbing transgender rights.”
The talking point was as simple as it was ubiquitous: With a stroke of his pen, Trump had launched an unprovoked attack on an embattled community.
Balderdash.
In truth, it was the Democrats who declared cultural war on their political opponents and waged it unreservedly from the confines of the Oval Office.
GOP gains in voter registration raise red flags for Democrats
Republican gains in voter registration are raising red flags for Democrats in key states, underscoring the inroads the GOP made across the country in 2024.
Active registered Republicans now outnumber Democrats in battleground Nevada for the first time in nearly two decades, according to January data from the state. The GOP has also gained recent ground in New Jersey, a traditionally blue state, and Trump this week celebrated that the voter registration majority in Florida’s Hillsborough county switched from blue to red.
The latest shifts, following eroding Democratic registration in states like Pennsylvania and Arizona last year, underscore the work that lies ahead for Democrats as they look to rebuild and retake power in Washington.
“People switch the way they vote, then they switch their registrations. And you think about Nevada and New Jersey, those are two states that saw pretty significant shifts towards the Republicans in November,” said Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
The exact factors behind changing registration numbers vary between states, and not every state counts its voters by party, Meredith noted. But the changes in Nevada and elsewhere largely reflect the voter behavior seen last fall, when Trump swept the battlegrounds and improved on his 2020 margins across the board, including in blue strongholds, as most of the country moved rightward.
Let’s expand K-12 education freedom to children in every state
My perspective as a mom of two school-aged kids informs nearly everything I do as a United States senator, and it is through my own life and conversations with other parents that I came to understand the importance of achieving universal educational choice as an option for every student in America.
That is why, during this year’s National School Choice Week, I once again proudly joined as a co-sponsor of the Educational Choice for Children Act, introduced by Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.). This bill would empower millions of parents in Alabama and across the country to access high-quality education that suits their child’s unique needs, regardless of income or zip code.
When it comes to education, one size does not fit all. Every family should be empowered to make the best possible choice for their child’s education. For many, that may be their traditional local public school; for others, it might be a traditional public school elsewhere; it could be a public charter or magnet school; it may be a private school or religious school; it could be a trade school; it could be home schooling; or it could be a virtual academy or hybrid solution.
The Educational Choice for Children Act would incentivize charitable donations to fund scholarships for families to use for K-12 education. Those scholarships would fund school tuition, supplemental educational services for children with special needs, tutoring, homeschool instruction and myriad of other expenses. As many as 2 million students across the U.S. would benefit from these scholarships, whether they live in the 32 states that have private school-choice laws or the 18 states that do not.
Sacrificing Your Children on the Altar of Diversity
~The Spectator, whose headlines are lazy and terrible and an embarrassment to a once great publication, had a particularly bad example the other day:
How many more knife attacks can France take?
Well, as noted in the very first sentence of the article, there are currently 120 “knife attacks” every day in France. A generation ago it would have been inconceivable that the French would accept with a collective Gallic shrug 850 “knife attacks” per week.
Yet they do. So would they be able to “take” a thousand per week? Check back with me later this year. Fifteen hundred? Two thousand? That’s the way to bet.
The French state, like other Continental countries, has certain advantages when it comes to holding the lid on things. For example, just a few days ago, Elias, 14, was leaving footie practice when he was impeded and told to cough up his cellphone. He refused. So they stabbed him. Elias was taken to hospital, but died the following day.
This didn’t happen in some distant provincial town the French elites don’t care about, but in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, as Elias was leaving the Jules Noël stadium, which has hosted prestigious international sporting events. So, unlike the other 119 “knife attacks” that day, it made the national news, and put officialdom on the backfoot. Thus, last Saturday, the Fédération française de football ordered a minute’s silence in Elias’s memory at all matches in Paris and across the country.
And, even as the nation rose in dignified hommage to fourteen-year-old Elias, just ten miles south the gendarmes were securing a crime scene in the woods at Épinay-sur-Orge, where the body of eleven-year-old Louise had just been discovered. She had been intercepted while leaving school the previous day, and found with more than a dozen stab wounds.
By now you may be wondering: Elias who? Louise who? Well, under the prevailing rules in France, as in Germany, the full names of the deceased cannot be published in the media.
Birthright Citizenship Excluded Illegals From Day One
Get ready for a Supreme Court showdown over President Donald Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship — the idea that all children born in the United States have the same rights, regardless of where their parents came from. Despite what many pundits and even lower court judges are saying, this is not a slam dunk for the president’s opponents. There are powerful arguments and Supreme Court precedents on both sides.
The case often cited, United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), actually supports Trump. The court ruled that the protections and guarantees afforded by the 14th Amendment belong to citizens and noncitizens alike, “so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here.”
That was 127 years ago.
1 big thing: Hegseth’s DOGE dreams
The Pentagon plans to welcome Elon Musk and “the keen eye of DOGE” to scrutinize its spending “very soon,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Axios’ Zachary Basu on the SecDef’s first overseas trip since taking office.
Why it matters: At more than $890 billion, the Pentagon’s budget is a behemoth — accounting for roughly half of the U.S. government’s discretionary spending this fiscal year.
It’s also a black box: The sprawling Defense Department has failed its annual audit seven years in a row, including this past December.
Contrary to DOGE’s downsizing goals, President Trump actually wants to increase defense spending — but believes Musk and his team can help salvage and redirect “billions of dollars” of inefficiencies in the military.
What we’re hearing: “There is waste, redundancies, and headcounts at headquarters that need to be addressed. There’s just no doubt,” Hegseth told Axios outside U.S. Africa Command here on Tuesday.
A fierce proponent of “getting back to basics,” Hegseth pointed to spending on dealing with climate change — prioritized as a national security threat by the Biden administration — as a clear target for cost-cutting.
“The Defense Department is not in the business of … solving the global thermostat. We’re in the business of deterring and winning wars,” the former Fox News host and Army combat veteran told Axios.
Russian defense spending overtakes Europe, study finds
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent its defense spending skyrocketing, and is raising fears it will attack NATO next.
Russia’s military expenditure is rising so fast that it is outperforming all European countries combined despite their effort to boost budgets and rearm, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ latest Military Balance report released Wednesday.
The think tank said that Russia’s military expenditure last year was forecast at 13.1 trillion rubles ($145.9 billion), or 6.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product — over 40 percent higher than the previous year.
Meanwhile, Europe’s combined 2024 defense spending was $457 billion, more than 50 percent higher in nominal terms than it was in 2014, and 11.7 percent higher in real terms than the previous year.
But if Russia’s spending is calculated in purchasing power parity terms — used in countries like Russia where domestic inputs are significantly cheaper than on the world market — the Kremlin’s military expenditure would come to $461.6 billion, the IISS said.
Russia surpassing all of Europe in military expenditures is something new, a result of its “remarkable” defense growth and industrial reform, said Fenella McGerty, an IISS senior fellow for defense economics.
Who is the real Mayor Pete?
Everybody loves Mayor Pete — for now. But will they once they find out who he really is?
Pete Buttigieg, formerly mayor of South Bend, Ind., said he is “taking a serious look” at Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, which will be at the center of the battle for congressional control in the 2026 midterms, with the departure of Michigan’s two-term Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
Michigan voters don’t bend easily toward carpetbaggers, which makes Buttigieg’s tenuous status as a Michigan resident a challenge if he runs. He moved in 2022 to the Traverse City, where his husband has family.
Buttigieg spent the last four years as former President Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary and a Democratic pontificator. With a massive reversal of electric vehicle subsidies and strict fuel emissions standards in the second Trump era, Buttigieg’s work there is at best a moot point, at worst a liability.
It is his past stated support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgery for federal inmates and illegal immigrants that is likely to be more suspicious to Michigan voters — along with a word-salad evolution, a la Kamala, to try to get out from under it.
In their bids to be the 2020 Democratic nominee for president, Buttigieg responded to the same 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union that became an issue for Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024.
Harris and Buttigieg both stated their support for using executive authority to ensure inmates and illegal migrants have access to “comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”
Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris: Peas in the Progressive Pod
Let’s check in on the Democrats:
David Hogg: Fire Elon Musk and Bring him back now. (Buttigieg)
That’s newly installed Democratic National Committee Vice Chairman David Hogg, a progressive would-be wunderkind, calling for the return (?) of Biden Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and the replacement (?) of Elon Musk by him.
Okay.
Neither Donald Trump nor Buttigieg will take Hogg up on this strange recommendation. Trump, for obvious reasons. But Buttigieg, an overrated technocrat who recently carpetbagged his way from Indiana to Michigan, is busy weighing a run for Senate there. Previous reporting suggested he might run for governor.
For some reason, Democrats perceive the former mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city as one of their best political talents at the moment. Yet Buttigieg, too, has gone through the gauntlet of wokeness to which progressive activists have forcibly subjected nearly all current or aspiring Democratic officeholders in recent years.
Which is why Buttigieg gave the same assurance to the ACLU that Kamala Harris (remember her?) did during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary: that he supported taxpayer-funded medicalized gender transitions for federal inmates and illegal immigrants.
Social Security COLA Update as New Prediction Announced
The Senior Citizens League (TSCL), a nonpartisan seniors group, has predicted a 2.3 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for 2026.
This prediction is lower than the 3.0 percent yearly change in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), as announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Why It Matters
The forecasted 2026 COLA of 2.3 percent reflects ongoing concerns about the sufficiency of Social Security adjustments in relation to rising living costs.
This underwhelming projection is crucial for approximately 68 million Americans who rely on these benefits to keep pace with inflation.
