ADDED: There's so much talk about how the Trump administration — especially DOGE — is moving too fast, so it's good to look back at the Biden administration, which was, as Klein tells it, moving way too slow. Slowness is the choice of those who love government and want more government, government that never ends. Look at what they did, not at what they said they wanted to do. Do they get problems solved or do they feed off unsolved problems?Jon Stewart screams 'OMFG' and is rendered speechless after hearing all 14 steps to apply for 'Build Back Better' funding:
— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 28, 2025
Ezra Klein: "We have to issue the notice funding opportunity within 180 days that's step one.
Step Two: States who want to participate must submit a letter… pic.twitter.com/n2B3knnNY8
March 28, 2025
Jon Stewart performs his classic oh-no-how-can-people-be-so-stupid mugging...
... as Ezra Klein reads 14 steps to apply for "Build Back Better" funding but I'm going to assume that some smart people knew what they were doing and plenty of people made money doing things this way:
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One can forget that there are two sides to the equation. One side is "The Process is the Punishment", but there is also the lesser-mentioned other side: "The Process provides the Profits"
Good morning.
to help counter the ick feeling you get from watching tired snooty leftists... I recommend this Greg Gutfeld monologue . The whole show is good.
No commercials!
waaaa - we need to provide stuff for all that free tax payer money. waaaaa.
btw- On Gutfeld - Kennedy is freaking hilarious. She is a star!
”… but I'm going to assume that some smart people knew what they were doing and plenty of people made money doing things this way:”
That would be one of your better assumptions, Professor.
The people that wrote the laws and regulations are on his team.
He people at the state level making money off the process are on his team.
The people that are making money throwing sand in the gears of that process are on his team.
And he still thinks DOGE are a bunch of nazis.
"... all fifty-six state..."
Did I hear that right? Has the arrow of time flipped a 180? Are we back in the Obama darkness?
The process is the product.
🤡👃on? or 🤡👃off?
Contrast this with Musk's Starlink.
No need for endless bureaucracy, ostensibly designed to protect (cough, cough) the expenditure of taxpayer funds to build the needed technological infrastructure.
A private company puts the needed technological infrastructure in place at its own, private risk.
The role for government, if any, is to subsidize the actual end user to achieve whatever level of affordable, "universal" internet access is the objective.
The Democratic Party at work.
"work"
How the Vogons were created.
To clarify the point made here - the populists base their argument on the premise that the real purpose of the whole process was an "okie-doke". It was not to achieve consensus on a plan, but to create a process that will serve as a "jobs maximizer" for the regulators and litigators who are deeply involved in this process as advocates and policy makers, while employing not a single workman who will actually build a physical system.
This is where the populists believe much of the "stolen money" that Musk is assigned to find is going. He is searching for and accumulating "receipts" in the DOGE process to follow the money throughout this process, throughout the government. The left has to be able to make the argument to a populist base (that outnumbers the educated base, and always will) that this is not a valid position, and explain why all these steps are necessary for a just application of our tax dollars to supply broadband equitably. This is what they have to defend.
Two points:
A. now, multiply this by the number of issues the govt deals with - charging stations, high-speed rail, immigration, health care, defense...
B. The oldest political cliche is that when you are explaining, you are losing.
Most populists see a physical item fixed or built in the course of their work day.
They want to see product, and a report is not product. Building the broadband infrastructure is product.
Spending this way without "product" is seen as waste, and time is a-wasting. This is where you drop in the argument that the Empire State building was built in X number of days in the depths of the depression, why can't we build anything now - the Chinese certainly can, can't they?
Needs a laugh track. And stewart cant do his killer comedy move, the one that has his TV audience rolling in the aisles, the "Raised eye brow".
Stewart has been playing the "clown nose off, clown nose on" game for 20 years. He's a leftwing Democrat and all his comedy pushes that. For some reason, some people like his comedy, so they dont' want to believe that.
This is just typical government contracting BS.. I can't believe I spend 20 years wrestling with it. .my pop and pop tech co was no match for the big players.
For an interesting look at how government (doesn't) work, I highly recommend reading Richard Feynman's writing about his time working on the Challenger space shuttle investigation. It was eye opening for me when I read it many years ago. No one in Washington even wants to solve anything.
The first rule of a goverment project is: Don't Kill The Job!
I learned this doing construction work on Boston's Big Dig (which took I-93 that ran right through downtown and essentially buried it.)
Initial Cost Estimate: $2.8 billion, to open in 1998.
Actual Cost (inflation adjusted): $21.5 billion.
It finally opened six years after the original 1998 date.
It then promptly flooded.
Neither Stewart nor Klein make the last obvious connection that this process is designed to give money to its allies to work both sides of this process. The fact that it promises broadband to Deplorables while ensuring it doesn’t happen is a bonus.
hes a mark, klein is a knave
Yup, this is why Washington DC is the richest metroplex in the country. These dollars flow back and forth. This is also the reason state governments do not like preventative maintenance very much. Preventative maintenance is not sexy but more important, there is not the enormous opportunity for people to make money doing the planning, designs, meetings, etc if new construction.
Now do the ev charger process.
I know Yglesias house (he's now on substack) was 27 million
grifting is very profitable,
Democrats are losing their minds because
1) they buy lies
2) many of them get paid for nothing on the tax payer funded grift line.
Come on - is anyone buying that Stewart is shocked by this.
no, not really, but the pretense is amusing
It doesn't make sense to deploy Fiber to rural areas. Between 5g and Starlink you could have most people on a decent internet connection pretty quickly. There are trade-offs, but I would take good enough now over great some time in the indeterminate future.
Come on - is anyone buying that Stewart is shocked by this.
...with the left there's always exists an element of deliberate and blissful ignorance of the universal truth that resources are finite. Money yes, but also time. Time. You betcha the writers make all those hoops to jump through because they know the riff-raff won't bother, then we can give the money to our friends and pretend they followed the rules...or given what we all now know some NGO may have given the winners the money for lawyers and staff to fill out all the paperwork...
Bingo Hostess. Sure, I wish DOGE could be as kind and humane as possible, but we are running 2 trillion dollar deficits. "Damn the torpedos, full speed awhead".
https://www.malone.news/p/friday-funnies-the-wormy-woke-apple?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Althouse said : "I'm going to assume that some smart people knew what they were doing and plenty of people made money doing things this way:" 100% true. They knew that they were propping up and paying bureaucrats and others who were their political allies. The true purpose of the bill was not to build anything, it was to launder the money.
and the side effect, was to inflate the dollar, making it have less purchasing power,
Seems obvious that the government’s aim is not the achievement of the goal but rather the Byzantine governmental process itself. Government justifies itself, gets paid in triplicate and then the crumbs get paid out toward the project at some undefined time in the future when no one remembers what the actual goal was.
This is evidence that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have fundamentally influenced a progressive media Rockstar.
One would think y'all would be jumping for joy at this sign of victory.
At the other extreme, a federal judge dealing with LA's homeless crisis commissioned an audit of how over $1b in funds were spent. Can't be done because records so messed up and lacking.
Authority evolves and progresses in darkness. Abort... I mean, audit.
But we should be grateful that Biden reduced unemployment by enlarging the federal government by 40% compared to pre-COVID.
I suspect that a lot of those steps were put in place to try and prevent fraud and corruption but they ended up with way too many steps in the process and that actually increased the possibility for fraud and corruption. People who engage in fraud and corruption are usually really good at figuring out ways to game complicated systems. The more complicated the system becomes, the harder it is to spot the fraud and corruption.
"One would think y'all would be jumping for joy at this sign of victory."
He is trying to communicate to his fellow leftists that they need to actually deliver something to their constituents if they want to win elections.
A brief bit of research on the interwebs and I find, according to AI, that the Rural Electrification Act was passed in 1936 and that by 1945 80% of rural homes and businesses had electricity. I would be surprised if there wasn't some grift, but govt officials and contractors back then knew not to kill the host.
"Slowness"? Government procedures are slow, but every administration realizes that it has only a couple of years (or a few months) to change things, so if you want to change things, you strike while the iron is hot.
Like other administrations, the Biden team got its laws passed and executive orders promulgated early on, but that was only the beginning of a long process leading to the ultimate implementation.
Starting up some new program requires a lot of paperwork. Shutting something down takes a lot less red tape to get the process started, but there will also probably be a goodly amount of paperwork involved before the process is completed.
So, you can get up to $5M in grants for submitting a plan. That's not a lot of revenue for a large company, but he refers to 56 applicants. There are about 10 large fiber internet companies in the US. Are the other companies small rural providers? John Stossel did a segment on the workforce requirements for federal contracts; they're hopelessly out of sync with the typical workforce of a company that actually builds networks.
Got a problem with this? The forms are over there. Use black ink pen only. Stand in line . Someone will be with you shortly.
Thank you for your patience.
The perfect government program must have the budget 100% spent before the first bucket of earth is dug. All spending must be done inside the beltway.
"Are the other companies small rural providers?"
That would be my guess. There are a lot of small rural providers who tie into regional providers' networks.
Both parties work in the committees on Capitol Hill -- they don't trust each other and demand "oversight" and "checks and balances." So...with no life experience in operations or engineering, their ideology-driven staffers craft ABSURDLY COMPLEX RULES. Then, the government must hire a bunch of patient (and relatively smart) people to make it all work.
Each of those hired to implement the crazy rules must validate, verify, and make sure every 'i' is dotted and every 't' is crossed. The elected people want it this way. Obey my rules. Respect my authority!
Oddly enough, I could not get any funding for my business out of the COVID funds, any of them, no matter how hard I tried. It seems only those with bigger businesses and/or connections to government somehow fulfilled the full 14 step procedure to be given "loans" that don't need repaid. Huh, how about that.
Oddly enough, I could not get any funding for my business out of the COVID funds, any of them, no matter how hard I tried. It seems only those with bigger businesses and/or connections to government somehow fulfilled the full 14 step procedure to be given "loans" that don't need repaid. Huh, how about that.
The left apparently love the sizzle so much they don't mind the rest of us never getting to the steak.
The icing on the cake, of course, is that there's no reason for the program to exist in the first place. Starlink already provides broadband just about everywhere, and even in urban areas, it's not outrageously priced compared to fiber. In rural areas, fiber is far more expensive, while Starlink costs the same.
You might argue that it's somehow unfair that a rural person has to pay more for Starlink than an urban person pays for fiber, but then, isn't it also unfair that urban housing costs so much more than rural housing does?
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