Kansas Crimson

1. Quarterbacks

There’s a saying in the NFL: When your team has two quarterbacks, it actually has zero quarterbacks.

What this means is that a franchise with two starting quarterbacks on the roster becomes paralyzed. There’s controversy. Both the locker room and management get divided into factions. Instead of having the team focused on moving forward and improving, all attention is focused on resolving the quarterback position. Usually both of the quarterbacks perform worse: They get happy feet. They rush their progressions. They’re so worried about losing their job that they either force things or become overly cautious. They can’t find the middle-ground of controlled aggression where a successful QB needs to live.

Which is why whenever an NFL team winds up in the two-quarterback trap, they try to unload one of the QBs as quickly as possible.

Right now America has three presidents. Which means we have zero presidents.

Joe Biden is, nominally, the sitting president of the United States. He occupies the Oval Office; he has the nuclear football. But for one reason or another, he has quiet-quit his job.

Donald Trump is the president-elect. He has no official power but has already started acting like the head of state. He’s meeting with dignitaries, making appearances at international events, issuing policy dictums.

Elon Musk has decided to act as a shadow president. Musk is the richest man in the world and one of the largest vendors to the U.S. government. He owns his own social network. He was the single largest donor to Trump’s campaign. Musk has set up shop at Trump’s Florida mansion; he accompanies Trump to various meetings; he issues his own policy dicta. He conducts himself like a non-state actor.

Three presidents. And so, zero presidents.

The federal government is about to shut down because Biden has declined to intervene, Trump has intervened on one side, and Musk has intervened on the other.

The question is: How long can this situation go on? Unlike with an NFL team, I think the answer is:

Indefinitely.

Biden will disappear on January 20, but we’ll still have Trump and Musk. And the same dynamic will apply: When you have two presidents, you have zero presidents.

Trump could push Musk aside. But why would he?

Trump is purely transactional, meaning that so long as Musk is on his team, he won’t ditch the weirdo. It isn’t like Trump values governing and will grow tired of Elon if Musk makes it impossible for Trump to pass the Endangered Widgets Act or whatever.

If anything, having Musk around making it harder for congressional Republicans to pass legislation might be useful to Trump, allowing him to triangulate and deflect voter dissatisfaction.

As for Musk, right now he’s a Trump fanboy. From his perspective, America is Twitter and he just purchased it. It’s his new toy and so it’s getting all of his attention. It seems unlikely that Musk will tire of his new possession in the near future. The U.S. government is a big organization. There are a nearly infinite number of opportunities to tinker with it. More importantly: The opportunities to get into public Twitter fights about the U.S. government are literally infinite. And history suggests that this is the key to holding Musk’s attention.

So Musk isn’t going to dump Trump.

The key is to understand that neither Trump nor Musk has any real incentive to make the federal government “work.” It can shut down, or not. It can pass legislation, or not.

Trump’s primary interests are expanding executive power, seeding the bureaucracy with loyalists, and perpetuating his ownership of the Republican party and viability as a potential candidate.

Musk’s primary interests are accumulating money and lulz.

None of these goals are in tension with one another.

I know that all sounds bad but maybe this is a best-case scenario for the next year?

Trump and Elon do their co-president routine; they both get what they want. And the damage to the liberal democratic foundations of the country is held to a minimum.

For an NFL team, the paralysis of a quarterback controversy is death. In America’s current situation, paralysis is probably the best we could hope for.

jfish26 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2024 1:28 pm

Overlander wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2024 10:01 pm So, will Trump have that 3rd term approved before or after the inauguration?

The argument will be that his first term was "stolen" from him by Russia, Russia, Russia.

On Wednesday of last week, the richest person in the world seized control of the government of the United States. It's going to be helpful, over the next four years, to note down the events that happen, when they happen, before the next events come along. The South African–born speculative technology entrepreneur Elon Musk ordered Congress not to pass the spending deal it was about to pass, and Congress obeyed him.

As Friday turned over into Saturday, at the last possible moment to avoid a government shutdown—or slightly after, though no one minded—Congress approved a different spending deal, with swaths of previously agreed-on legislation cut out of it. Pharmaceutical benefits managers were allowed to keep siphoning money out of Medicare and Ticketmaster was free to keep hiding its fees from customers, but daily federal operations were funded into mid-March. The budget crisis was over, or at least paused.

The real crisis was here to stay. To say that Congress did, in the end, pass a spending bill is like saying that Joe Biden did end up taking office peacefully in January of 2021. The mob that Donald Trump sent to the Capitol didn't overturn the 2020 election result, it merely established that the Republican Party—and with it, half of the two-party system—belonged to violent reactionaries, unconstrained by the constitution or criminal law. Musk's blitz of posting did not shut down the government, or achieve his demand via Twitter, that "No bills should be passed Congress until Jan. 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office." It simply demonstrated that one private person, acting on his own crank impulses, could command Congress to come to a halt, and Congress would, with the president-elect going along.

Like the last coup attempt, this power grab was bungling and incoherent. Once again, the only immediate effect was to smash up some things—food-stamp fraud protection, rather than windows—and to cause a lot of commotion, and to waste Congress's time. Musk made it clear that he didn't know anything about what he was doing: He raged against the congressional pay raise in the measure while inflating its value by an order of magnitude, demanded that nonexistent Washington, D.C. stadium funds be stripped out, and warned that the bill was "funding bioweapon labs" when it was funding bio-containment facilities. "Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!" he posted, apparently unaware that the Senate runs on staggered six-year terms.

There's a theory that Musk was specifically scheming to kill the parts of the original bill that would have tightened restrictions on investments in "sensitive technologies" in China. But if he was putting on a show to distract from his real financial interests, it was a show that looked exactly like the strenuously aggrieved, fractally distractible posting he indulges in all the time. By Thursday night, while Congress was scrambling up to come up with a new and different spending deal that might pass, Musk's attention had flickered across the Atlantic. At 1:03 a.m., he posted "Only the AfD can save Germany," endorsing the neo-Nazi Alternativ für Deutschland party in the upcoming election.

On one level, that could have been read as Musk embracing his personal fascist heritage. But also he was pretty blatantly trying to ingratiate himself with, or flirt with, a 24-year-old fascist influencer who had posted a pro-Musk, pro-AfD video with her face filter-tuned into waifishness. Musk has commandeered a culturally dominant social media platform and re-engineered it to make himself the most visible and important figure on it, yet he's still a floppy follower at heart, scrounging for approval.

What happens when a reply guy is in command? As when Trump himself listens to his rally crowds to figure out what to care about, Musk was riding waves of borrowed resentment, reposting those biowarfare conspiracies straight from Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok—who posts, in turn, whatever will best keep her own audience seething and therefore engaged. The propaganda machine propagandizes the propagandizers first; the agenda is what keeps the agenda going.

When the Associated Press posted on Friday, "A car has driven into a group of people at a Christmas market in Germany," vice president–elect JD Vance quote-posted "Who was driving the car?"—not because he was doing pedestrian-safety urbanist media criticism, but because an apparent attack on European Christians was the story his chosen audience would want to hear. As the incoming vice president, Vance presumably could have put his question directly to informed sources in the counterterrorism sector. Instead, he put it out rhetorically, for his readers to answer as they chose. When the real answer turned out to be that the accused attacker was a Saudi-born anti-Muslim obsessive who shared Vance's xenophobia and enthusiasm for AfD, Vance simply left the post up and moved on.

"When we act, we create our own reality," an anonymous George W. Bush administration official, now presumed to be Karl Rove, told the reporter Ron Suskind 22 years ago. It sounded at the time like maximum nihilism, but the official was at least referring to a shared experience: The people exercising power would change things, and their critics would just have to live with the effects of that power.

Now Trump, Vance, and Musk are blustering their way forward with the confidence that none of what they do has to mean anything, and that no one bears responsibility. As the spending-bill chaos spread, it was easy enough to declare that Musk had revealed himself to be the real president-in-waiting. It fit the facts, and Musk and Trump and their hangers-on were gratifyingly huffy and defensive about it, to the point of spinning up a whole new branch of conspiracy theory about why people would say such a thing.

But it also felt like an over-rationalization of events. So too did the effort by the most fanatically Trumpy House members to start talking about replacing Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House with Musk. Ridiculous as that was, it represented some sort of vague recognition of how far out of hand the whole episode had gotten: Making Musk the Speaker would at least wedge his role back within the limits of the constitutional order.

The question around Trump's second presidency all along has been who will actually be in charge. Trump didn't have the basic ability or work ethic to do the job before, and now he's four years more decrepit, confused, and uninterested. The point of Project 2025 was that as soon as Trump moved back into the Oval Office, a corps of well-trained, reptilian little go-getters would roll up their sleeves and start implementing the wishlist for the people who'd been funding the conservative movement. They would take care of reversing the 20th-century regulatory state and civil rights movement, while Trump went golfing or played with his model of Air Force One.

But before they could even get started, Musk's drug-churned mania expanded to fill the Trump-sized void. The plutocracy skipped straight ahead to oligarchy. Musk's antics with Congress were just an outward expression of how his position had already changed. As of next month, the officials who wouldn't let him know what was on his own rockets, or who tried to investigate him for seemingly blatant securities manipulation or the way his fake driving software kills people will all be working for Trump. Since the stretch run of the campaign, Musk has gained something like $200 billion in net worth. That's the dollar value, so far, of being immune to consequences.

THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE is an easy agency to hate. And Republicans, with an accidental assist from Democrats, just made it easier than ever.

It’s sad—or SAD, as Donald Trump might say—because the unlovable tax-collection bureaucracy is just beginning to get its act together after decades of cutbacks and restrictions, sometimes in reaction to scandals that proved false or overblown. The upshot has been a depleted IRS with ancient technology, severe personnel shortages, and record gaps between taxes owed and taxes paid on time ($688 billion in 2021 and $696 billion in 2022).

Democrats broke the cycle with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Joe Biden. The law, which passed both the House and Senate with zero GOP votes, gave the IRS nearly $80 billion over ten years to improve customer service, update business systems, and increase compliance by high-income people and corporations.

A better, more consumer-friendly IRS? One that has the people, expertise, and technology it needs to answer taxpayer phone calls, clear 24 million backlogged paper tax returns, contact high-income taxpayers who owe more, delve into complicated tax-evasion schemes, and offer more online digital services? And collects far more money from rich and corporate tax evaders than it spends on audits, thus helping to reduce deficits and the need to raise taxes?

“It seems like a fiscal no-brainer to me,” Maya MacGuineas, head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in November. Count me in, too.

Unfortunately, Republicans have been trying to claw back the money ever since Biden signed the law. Debt and budget negotiations in 2023 shaved the $80 billion to $58 billion. Then, wait for it, a funding bill in September mistakenly duplicated the language of the original $20 billion IRS cut last year—and Democrats didn’t notice.

They tried in negotiations to cancel the unintended $20 billion repeat cut and ensure the money remained with the IRS. But the GOP rejected the change, and the government spending law Biden just signed largely continues that September law through March.

Democrats say they’ll try again in March. Will anyone care, or even notice? Here’s why they should:

* Wait times for callers in the last two filing seasons have averaged three minutes, the IRS said, down from twenty-eight minutes in the 2022 filing season before the new law. They’ll be back to twenty-eight minutes in the 2026 filing season if resources are not restored, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in November.

* A fall 2023 initiative using the law’s new resources recovered over $1.1 billion in recognized tax debt from millionaires, the IRS reported in September. It also reported collecting $172 million from people with known income over $400,000, but who had not filed tax returns since 2017. Cost to collect per $100? Thirty-four cents. This is what you call evidence-based policymaking. (Remember the days when at least some Republicans preached that concept?)

* The agency says it has introduced more digital tools in the last two years than in the past twenty, including mobile tools for taxpayers and online accounts that allow them to see historical data and refund and audit status. It also launched a free tax-filing tool in twelve states and said in May it would become a permanent option for all taxpayers in the 2025 filing season.

Has success jinxed the direct-file tool? Is it too popular? During a five-week period in the 2024 filing season, the IRS reported, more than 140,000 filers claimed over $90 million in refunds and saved an estimated $5.6 million in tax preparation fees on their federal returns. So maybe that’s why, in a December 10 letter to President-elect Trump, twenty-nine House Republicans urged him to eliminate the direct-file option on Day One of his new term.

Sigh.

The Republican case against the IRS infusion has involved a lot of fearmongering about escalating audits of everyday Americans and IRS agents at their doors. That said, the reality of who actually gets audited is eye-opening. The audit rate in fiscal year 2022 (from October 1, 2021 to September 30, 2022) was 0.5 percent for earners between $200,000 and $1 million, according to a Syracuse University analysis.

“The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit,” the Syracuse analysis said. The odds of a millionaire getting audited by an IRS revenue agent were 1.1 percent.

The agency is still working out how to comply with a Biden administration directive to make sure audit rates of small businesses and under-$400,000 households do not go up. The challenges include how to set a historical baseline year, calculate income, and define “small business.” So in some respects, the reforms are still a work in progress.

Whether that progress continues now is an open question. If you’re a fan of efficient, consumer-friendly, fair-minded government, there’s good reason to be furious with Democrats—who handed the GOP a huge gift by failing to catch that $20 billion error. As the New Republic put it last month, “Democrats forgot to read the fine print on a bill and spoon-fed a huge victory to Republicans who want to kill the IRS.”

But there’s even more reason to call out Republicans because, from Trump on down, they campaigned and won by touting fake populism and pretending to care deeply for the working folk. The endgame in starving the IRS is not to make it work better for normal people, or to bring in more revenue to reduce the deficit or the tax burden on low- and middle-income taxpayers.

It’s to make sure the billionaires, millionaires and corporate captains in Trump’s circle don’t have to endure tax audits or even nudges to pay up. An IRS once again cut to the bone won’t have the resources to chase after the billions in taxes owed by the nation’s economic elite.

That is the point, and everyone should care.

My experiences with private-sector package delivery are, to put it mildly, not the best. As I write this, I’m watching and fretting over a package that is supposed to be delivered to my apartment by FedEx, which only occasionally manages to locate me despite the several decades of experience I’m told that they’ve amassed in this industry. The gold standard for delivery has been the U.S. Postal Service, which has never failed me, even as I watch UPS and Amazon stumble around outside, frequently almost making it to my doorstep. But now I’m reading that the incoming Trump administration is mulling privatizing the USPS. Chances are the president-elect’s famous reverse Midas touch will ruin yet another service on which I’ve long relied.

What Trump promises to do to the venerable post office would be the latest example of what has come to be known as “enshittification”—a term coined by Cory Doctorow and recently defined by the Macquarie Dictionary as “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.” So it’s fitting that Trump is teaming up with techbro goons, in particular Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, on the next big enshittification project: ruining the federal government.

The federal government typically gets a bad rap from the media, who often depict it as a faceless, bloated, and lethargic bureaucracy. But as Michael Lewis documented in his book The Fifth Risk, as well as a series of stories along similar lines he curated last year at The Washington Post, the civil service is a hive of innovation driven by brilliant, hardworking Americans. Our army of loyal public servants does a lot of important, quiet work—from key medical and scientific research to pollution mitigation to chasing down tax cheats and protecting consumers to keeping our food and medicine safe.

As Trump and his cronies see it, though, these workers are actually left-wing “deep state” soldiers whose sole purpose is to thwart his authoritarian designs. That’s why he waged total war on the administrative state during his first term and plans to pick up where he left off with a shock-and-awe purge of the federal workforce. If he succeeds by even a fraction of his goal, we’re all likely to learn just how important the government is in our lives—by experiencing what happens when it becomes the equivalent of Google’s AI search results or Amazon’s endless stream of junk. All that invisible work done every day on our behalf becomes all too evident when it’s not being done by competent professionals.

You also shouldn’t discount the maladroit impact of Trump’s own army of weirdos. The empowerment of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. creates an environment where crackpots are suddenly allowed to subject the known world to their flawed interrogations. What will it be like to live in a country where things like the polio vaccine are suddenly the subject of a reopened debate? As Dan Drezner recently explained, there is a lot of tail risk that arises when settled matters suddenly become unsettled:

Agreeing to a debate on this topic is like agreeing to a debate about whether the Earth is flat. Even if there is no scientific evidence to support such an outdated worldview, the idea that a debate should be had can be enough to sow doubts about the current consensus. The entire upside to the debate strategy rests with the conspiracy theorists.

The second problem with agreeing to a debate is that it is not cost-free. Energy and time spent on defending concepts like, “vaccines are good” cannot be devoted to other questions of public policy. Instead, advocates pushing crackpot ideas get to extend the Overton Window. Even if, for example, the debate about the polio vaccine goes nowhere, it becomes more politically acceptable to say, “sure, some vaccines are important, but surely reasonable people can agree that we should continue to ask questions about health risks to our children from so many vaccines.”

It’s bad enough that we have to contemplate the whole hard-won world of medicine coming undone, especially at the hands of a president who managed to evade public opprobrium for badly mismanaging a once-in-a-century pandemic. But the federal government’s role in protecting us from financial predators is likely to take a huge hit in the coming administration as well. Beyond the typical Republican obsession for letting plutocratic tax cheats get away with murder, the incoming Trump administration is fairly well bought by the scammy cryptocurrency industry, whose cash investment in our recent election cycle should have earned more concern from the political press.

As The New Republic’s Matt Ford noted, the crypto oligarchs have some pretty specific demands:

What do they expect to get in return for these campaign donations? A more favorable regulatory and law enforcement environment, for one thing. Leading crypto figures know that all those pesky regulators and investigators in Washington—the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, and so on—could bring their party to an end. Trump has even pledged to make the U.S. a “Bitcoin superpower,” whatever that means. For now, it means installing pro-crypto figures atop the SEC and other key agencies.

The unholy grail for the crypto industry may be to get their casino more deeply entangled with the real economy and, as Ford writes, “to get the federal government—and, by extension, all Americans—to be the ultimate bag-holder by directly buying cryptocurrencies with taxpayer dollars.” We’re probably now at the threshold of the first big crash of the cryptogrift industry and the first big government bailout of these crooks. If you remember how well the last round of government bailouts helped restore everyone’s faith in the system, well, hold on to your butts.

The sad fact of modern life is that we’ve been trending toward oligarchy for a long while now. Over a decade ago, a study released by Princeton University researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page reached an unsettling conclusion: that “rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of or even against the will” of the people. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” they wrote, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Ten years on, this is no longer an esoteric matter or a funny feeling running in the background of American life. The once and future Trump era promises to put the cherry on the oligarchic sundae. Between the anarchy wrought by various Supreme Court rulings (notably Dobbs and the administrative state–decimating Loper Bright decision), the renewed potential for financial ruin in the form of government-endorsed crypto rug-pulls and the widespread rise of addictive sports gambling apps, a defanged federal government allowing financial predators and polluters a freer rein, and the coming loss of health care coverage as the GOP renews its war on the Affordable Care Act, the next few years are going to come with a substantial body count.

They will also come with a collapse in faith in government, just as we have soured on the increasingly shitty tech platforms that dominate our lives. A citizenry that was once fairly well cared for will realize that they’ve been abandoned to the wolves, alone in the world against all manner of natural disasters, high-tech criminals, and a consumer world no longer protected by any kind of watchdog. It’s hard to know what the United States will become once everyone is more like a cornered animal than an actual citizen. As the former CEO of United Healthcare might attest, it’s probably not the best idea to leave such a heavily armed populace so discontented and disconnected. In that way, we might come to learn the most important role that the administrative state plays in our daily lives: It helps keep the peace.

japhy wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 9:59 am There have been a number of car bombs over the years. Rarely does the vehicle take center stage. How often does the CEO of the car company get online immediately to let everyone know the explosion was definitely NOT a vehicle malfunction?

How many even know what vehicle ran down pedestrians in New Orleans? The Ford 150 is one of the most recognizable vehicles on the road. But it doesn't make the immediate visual statement of a cybertruck.

And how often when a vehicle is used as a car bomb, is there immediate commentary on how the "structure and build of the vehicle reduced the explosion impact"?

Just an observation.

I guess when your vehicle has numerous glitches and problems, being able to say "the truck bed is too well built to make a good car bomb" is something you can put in your promotional sales pitch?

KUTradition wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 11:29 am the F150 was also rented on Turo, i believe

(despite foxnews reporting multiple times that it came across the southern border)

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 12:31 pm what was the name of the savage that blew up new orleans . I didn't catch it.

do they know his identity.

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 12:48 pm oh. maybe it is too early for them to have identified the savage.

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 12:48 pm oh. maybe it is too early for them to have identified the savage.

jfish26 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 12:38 pm

MICHHAWK wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 12:31 pm what was the name of the savage that blew up new orleans . I didn't catch it.

do they know his identity.

He was a citizen and former member of our armed forces, if that's what you're getting at.