Elon Musk does not dream of colonizing distant worlds. His dream is to milk the federal government of every penny he can get, and his real goal is about tapping into lucrative defense contracts.

• SpaceX is leading a bid to build Golden Dome with startups Anduril and Palantir, six people said
• The SpaceX-led group is pitching the Pentagon on a ‘subscription model’ for missile defense, sources said
• SpaceX proposes a constellation of 400 to more than 1,000 missile defense satellites, sources said

“Golden Dome” is just another Trump boondoggle, an excuse to throw away more money. It’s in contradiction to his claim to be improving government efficiency, which is code speak for starving the poor and throwing more money to the top 1% and to defense contractors. He’s going to pick who those contractors get to be.

One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as “a departure from the usual acquisition process. There’s an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government.”
SpaceX and Musk have declined to comment on whether Musk is involved in any of the discussions or negotiations involving federal contracts with his businesses.

I bet the defense industry is deferential — they want more money.

Because he’s actually an evil villain, Musk has another devious plan to unfold.

In an unusual twist, SpaceX has proposed setting up its role in Golden Dome as a “subscription service” in which the government would pay for access to the technology, rather than own the system outright.
The subscription model, which has not been previously reported, could skirt some Pentagon procurement protocols allowing the system to be rolled out faster, the two sources said. While the approach would not violate any rules, the government may then be locked into a subscription and lose control over its ongoing development and pricing, they added.

He’ll be an obscenely wealthy man who possesses total control of a thousand military satellites floating above the United States! This sounds like the plot to a James Bond movie.

This is also how Nazis talk.

In a press conference Wednesday morning that surely delighted his allies in the anti-vaccine movement, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to a report about apparent rising autism rates with a vow to look at “environmental factors” as a possible cause. While Kennedy didn’t explicitly discuss vaccines, his remarks made it clear, again, that he’ll likely use the power and money of the federal government to prop up the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. He also repeatedly made crude and stigmatizing references to people with profound autism (which he calls “severe” autism, an outdated term) painting a picture of such people as a burden on society and to their families.

“These are kids who will never pay taxes,” Kennedy declared. “They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children.”

“The epidemic,” Kennedy said at another point, “is real.” Autism, he added, “destroys families and more importantly it destroys our greatest resource, our children.” Many children, he claimed, were “fully functional” and “regressed.”

Vaccines do not cause autism. I repeat, vaccines do not cause autism — this bogus claim has been tested repeatedly and in depth. This is a red herring, one that RFK jr will pursue at great cost to our country and to the health of our children. He does not actually care about children, his priority is defending his delusions.

The world has gone down this road before. This talk is a prelude to first institutionalizing autistic children, then sterilizing them, and then quietly, and no doubt painlessly at first, exterminating them. They’re useless, a drain on society, so why not get rid of them?

Furthermore, look at this chilling gem from the CDC report: white kids aren’t afflicted as much as black and hispanic kids. We already know this administration is racist as fuck, so here’s more fodder for the white nationalists.

RFK Jr. called today’s press conference to discuss new findings published this week in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which found an increase in apparent autism rates, from 1 in 36 children to 1 in 31. The report, based on 2022 data, found that the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder was higher in 8-year-old children than in previous years, and higher in Black, Hispanic and Asian Pacific Islander children than in white children.

I’ve mentioned before that my grandson is autistic. He has learning and language disabilities, but he’s going to a special school and his language is getting much better.

He loves playing with his father’s phone — he has figured out how to call me, so every once in a while I’ll get a surprise FaceTime call, and he’ll say “Hi, grandpa,” and then be at loss for words for a while, and he’ll close by saying “I love you, grandpa,” and go back to playing. He likes playing music on the phone, and has somehow figured out how to send his playlist in a text message to me. He seems to be on an Elton John kick right now, and he’s a fan of the Bee Gees.

He’s a human being, and his family loves him. How dare this incompetent, over-privileged fantasist dehumanize him?

Really, I don’t blame you.

Can I move in with you, instead?

That’s some headline I saw on the front page of the Star Tribune this morning.

Say what? Republicans opposing the extremists in their ranks? This is good to see…except the mainstream Republicans are only opposing this one radical group because it’s fighting against the extremism of the mainstream Republicans.

Top officials in the Minnesota Republican Party recently gathered to take an unprecedented vote: formally condemning a right-wing group that has antagonized GOP elected officials for years.

Action 4 Liberty was repeatedly attacking Republicans in the divided Minnesota House for compromising with Democrats, while also encouraging “grassroots Patriots” to oust party officers at local conventions and replace them with hardline activists.

The state GOP’s executive committee declared that leaders of Action 4 Liberty are more focused on “tearing down Republicans” than helping the party win elections: “The leadership of the organization instead works only to enrich themselves, attack those actually making a difference, and claim victories they had nothing to do with,” read the declaration brought forward by committee member Bobby Benson, who’s the state chief of staff for Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer.

This is a counter-move led by Tom Emmer’s wing of the party, and Emmer is an unpleasant conservative hardliner and big fan of Donald Trump. Action 4 Liberty is just an even more extreme subset of the Minnesota Republicans — they call Tom Emmer a Globilist[sic] RINO which tells you how far out these guys are. This isn’t an effort to make the Republicans a little more sane, it’s just a civil war within the party that’s going to bring more chaos to the far right, and leave them unchanged.

Action 4 Liberty has had some recent successes, which leave me unimpressed.

Action 4 Liberty has enlisted grassroots activists across the state in its effort to push the GOP further to the right, telling them to seek party positions and primary incumbent lawmakers. Its success has varied over the years, with many of its candidates losing primary battles to more moderate Republicans. But last year, the group rallied activists who ousted state GOP Chair David Hann, endorsed far-right Republican Royce White for U.S. Senate and blocked GOP U.S. Rep. Michelle Fischbach from winning the party’s endorsement.

Michelle Fischbach is my representative, and she’s a horrid conservative. I am pleased to see her blocked from accomplishing anything. It is amusing that it’s her fellow Republicans who are busy standing in her way.

The DFL doesn’t care which crazy faction controls the MNGOP, since they’re going to suck no matter what.

Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin released the following statement after MNGOP Chair David Hann was deposed on Saturday with the help of far-right activists, including the group Action 4 Liberty.

“The Minnesota GOP has been completely captured by the most extreme, fringe activists in Minnesota politics,” said Minnesota DFL Chairman Ken Martin. “Control of Minnesota’s entire state government is on the ballot in 2026. Today’s chaos shows that if Minnesota Republicans regain power, they will be beholden to the same far-right fringe that now dominates the national Republican Party.”

The Minnesota GOP has not won a statewide election in Minnesota in almost two decades.

Remember Garbage Pail Kids, those collectable cards that illustrated horrible, disgusting cartoon characters? They were pretty tame in comparison to this version: an illustrator drew up some “Enemies of Democracy” cards (perfect name, by the way) and has posted them on Instagram. There are lots, and all of them gruesomely accurate.

Now I’ve gotta collect them all.

Despite my enduring fondness for the great state of Oregon, I hadn’t been following the politics there, so I missed an amazing turn of good news from the 2025 elections in Oregon.

November’s election told the Oregon Republican Party it needed a fresh start. While voters nationally returned President Donald Trump to the White House, it was a different story in Oregon, where Republicans lost the 5th Congressional District seat; lost all statewide contests; and lost a seat in each legislative chamber, returning the Democrats to supermajorities in both.

Wow. We have to do that in the next election for all 50 states.

As the article points out, the Republicans have had to do some soul-searching and fix what’s wrong with them. I don’t think they can, but it’s good that they’re at least trying. The first step was to find new chairman for the Oregon GOP. They found a guy.

In a Feb. 16 YouTube interview with a GOP political consultant, the eventual winner, Gerald “Jerry” Cummings, 51, a pastor and insurance agent from Columbia County, sketched out a path to success for his party in Oregon, saying Republicans should spend less time “tangled up in social issues” and focus on building the party rather than on angry rhetoric and internecine warfare.

I guess that’s a promising start, but “pastor and insurance agent”? Yuck. I’d put a big red flag on him. But too late, they did more digging and found a few little problems, like his poor relationship with creditors. And his wife.

Court records provide details from a long-running divorce and custody case, which stretched across three counties and lasted nearly a decade, that raise questions about Cummings’ ability to set the tone his party desires. More recently, lawsuits filed by Cummings’ creditors undercut his suitability for a role that requires managerial acumen and financial skills.

Bob Tiernan, a former lawmaker, GOP party chair and the runner-up in the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary, says he’s disappointed that Cummings is leading the party. “We need the strongest possible people there,” Tiernan says. “We need somebody that doesn’t have damaging accusations against them—whether they are true or not.”

It was an acrimonious divorce. Cummings is a sicko.

In court records, which have never been previously reported, Cummings’ ex-wife, a pastor’s daughter, said the couple met in the Portland area when she was 16 and he was 26 and an associate pastor. “On occasion, he would visit [her] when her parents were out of town and take her to hotels,” a trial memo filed by her attorney says. “He persuaded her that her parents did not truly love her as only he did, and that having sex with him at such a young age was appropriate.”

The couple married in 2003, when she was 19. “From the beginning of and throughout their marriage, [Cummings] would tell [his then-wife] about his sexual fantasies with young girls while they were having sexual intercourse,” the trial memo says. “He promised not to act on those fantasies so long as [his then-wife] allowed him to do whatever he wanted in their sexual relationship.”

But in a handwritten application for a restraining order coinciding with the divorce filing, the woman said her husband’s behavior spun out of control.

“I was handcuffed and hit with hangers,” she wrote. “Early in the marriage, he had a whip he hit me with.”

She added other allegations, including spousal rape. “He forced me to have sex with him and caused injury,” Cummings’ ex-wife wrote. “He has threatened if I don’t perform sexual activities, he will perform sexual activities on minors and he mentions them by name.” (OJP is not naming Cummings’ ex-wife because of her allegations of sexual violence.)

He denies all the allegations, except, of course, that he committed statutory rape on a 16 year old, and he does admit that he was a terrible husband, and [she] and I, both victims of early sexual assault, had a very unhealthy marriage.

It’s good that he claims he never acted on his pedophilic/hebephilic desires, except of course the fact that he had sex with a 16 year old when he was 26, but still…what is it with conservative authoritarians and their fantasies of having sex with children? Speaking for myself, I’ve never felt that — if anything I’m repelled at the idea — but I guess if you’re Republican, it’s just normal.

Anyway, it’s telling that when the Oregon Republicans decided to dive back into the pool of candidates and find someone new and fresh and full of healthy ideas to reinvigorate the party, all they came up with is another rotten apple. I guess if all you’ve got is a big barrel of rotting fruit, you’re not going to find a shiny clean unblemished representative by rummaging through it.

This goes for the Democrats, too — we’re less likely to come up with a pedo, but instead will find a shriveled, nearly mummified old gomer who will persist in pushing the failed ideas of the past.

There’s a big anti-Trump protest in St Cloud this weekend. We’re not having such a good event here in Morris, although I did overhear two old ladies in the coffee shop this morning, and while they also complained about the Democrats, they grumbles a lot about Elon Musk. They really hate Musk, which was heartwarming.

I couldn’t be at any protests today, but I did spawn an individual many years ago who carried on for me.

Good work, young man!

Does this man look like a far-right conservative advocate for manliness?

Maybe. He does have woman assistants posing to help him sell shaving products while their sterna are exposed. He is a weird, twisted macho man — that’s Jeremy Boreing, one of the founders of The Daily Wire, along with that shaved chipmunk, Ben Shapiro. He was responsible for that weird conservative “comedy”, Lady Ballers, that proposed that men would dress up as women en masse so they could form a whole basketball of “transgenders,” who would then win all their games. That’s Jeremy Boreing. Sexist, not funny, and with ambitions to make movies to support his conservative beliefs, because reality doesn’t do the job for him.

Say goodbye to Boreing, he’s out at the Daily Wire.

The Daily Wire is seemingly undergoing a rapid and dramatic implosion following the resignation of co-founder Jeremy Boreing.

According to a Twitter/X thread compiled by journalist James Li, the company has laid off roughly 25% of its workforce, including the complete shutdown of its kids division, and fired Alyssa Cordova, the vice president of public relations.

Cordova is alleged to have played a central role in crafting an aggressive and controversial PR strategy, which included stalking former employees online and maintaining dossiers on perceived enemies.

Internal sources blame Boreing’s leadership for the current crisis, claiming his departure should have happened sooner to prevent job losses.

With leadership in disarray and significant layoffs, questions loom about the future stability of The Daily Wire and its high-profile personalities like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles.

Oh yeah…Matt Walsh (“What is a woman?” he asks, since he doesn’t know) and Michael Knowles (sick little Catholic fundamentalist) all work there, too. Maybe they’ll be kicked off the gravy train soon.

Would you believe the Daily Wire had a kids’ programming division? They were making a knock-off of Bluey to inoculate children with conservative values. It’s going, too.

This is what happens when oil billionaires like Dan and Farris Wilks, who funded the Daily Wire try to force support for an unpopular agenda, rather than responding to popular interests organically. They flounder and fail repeatedly, and while the big money men might think the message is great, billionaires tend to be unimpressed with stuff that just costs them cash with little return.

Hey, let’s hope PragerU is next to decay.