Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Elon Musk, the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, on Tuesday dismissed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill as a “disgusting abomination.”

“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” he said in a post on X.

“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” he added.

Musk’s comments on Tuesday represent an even harsher reaction to the bill than his previous criticisms. Last month, he said he was “disappointed” by the House passage of the bill because it undermines the work he has done as the head of DOGE.

“The president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday. “It doesn’t change the president’s opinion.”

While the bill aims to cut $1.5 trillion in government spending, it also increases the debt limit by $4 trillion. The U.S. government is more than $36 trillion in debt.

The bill would extend the 2017 tax cuts, introduce new tax cuts such as Trump’s signature “no tax on tips” policy, and add work requirements to Medicaid, among other provisions.

The measure passed 215 to 214 in the House, largely along party lines after Speaker Mike Johnson was able to overcome opposition from members of his caucus who argued the bill should include further spending cuts to offset tax cuts that will add to the country’s deficit.

Musk thoughts mirror my own. They should not have used reconciliation on a bill that doesn’t balance the budget.

Beyond entitlement reform, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget offers users an option in a fix-the-debt-yourself game. Among the options are medical-malpractice reform (saving the U.S. government $40 billion over ten years), allowing private plans to compete with Medicare ($360 billion over ten years), banning state Medicare matching gimmicks ($830 billion over ten years), rescinding Inflation Reduction Act climate tax credits ($780 billion over ten years), and repealing and replacing student-debt cancellation ($320 over ten years). Enact all of those, and that’s another $233 billion per year or so.

The administration of California Governor Gavin Newsom held closed-door talks on trade cooperation with Chinese officials on Monday, ahead of the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s massacre at Tiananmen Square.

The meeting will take place on the sidelines of the China-California Business Forum, an annual summit hosted by the Chinese consulate general in Los Angeles at the city’s ritzy Biltmore Hotel. That annual gathering gives local and state politicians an opportunity to rub shoulders with their Chinese counterparts.

The Newsom administration’s participation in the meeting comes just ahead of the June 4 anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which is commemorated by Chinese pro-democracy advocates and human rights advocates.

Should we be relieved that Newsom isn’t actually sleeping with any of them?

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, has returned to the United States to face criminal charges for allegedly transporting illegal immigrants within the U.S., the Department of Justice said Friday.

Last month, a federal grand jury in Tennessee indicted Abrego Garcia, who was deported two months ago from Maryland to El Salvador.

Prosecutors say Abrego Garcia was involved in a nearly decade-long conspiracy to transport thousands of illegal immigrants from Texas to other areas around the country. The illegal immigrants, some of whom were members of the MS-13 gang, came from Mexico and Central America.

“The grand jury found that over the past nine years Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday. “They found this was his full-time job. Not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. He made over 100 trips, the grand jury found, smuggling people throughout our country.”

While the allegations were not included in the May 21 indictment, Bondi said that Abrego Garcia also solicited nude images from a minor and was linked to the murder of a rival gang member’s mother. Co-conspirators also accused Abrego Garcia of assaulting women whom he transported across the country and claimed he was also involved in trafficking firearms and narcotics.

No wonder he’s a poster child for Democrats…

Francesca Gino was regularly cited as an authority by prominent left-leaning outlets such as National Public Radio and the New York Times. Both outlets now admit that Gino’s research was likely fabricated. Disturbingly, the flaws in her research were exposed not by the allegedly robust university system of peer review, but by a series of posts by science bloggers.

No professor has had tenure revoked at Harvard since the 1940s, when the rules for doing so were formalized, according to the Harvard Crimson. This is the academic nuclear option.

Gino’s first retracted study showed evidence of data fabrication all the way back in 2021, and an investigation into her academic dishonesty lasted for the following two years.

The Texas Senate succeeded in pushing a majority of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s legislative priorities through both chambers during the regular legislative session. Patrick released a list of 40 pieces of priority legislation in the first three months of the year, covering a variety of issues.

Here is the status of the Senate priority bills in the 89th Legislative Session:

• Senate Bill 1 – Senate’s Budget for Texas: Passed both chambers.
• Senate Bill 2 – Providing School Choice: Signed into law.
• Senate Bill 3 – Banning THC in Texas: Sent to Gov. Greg Abbott.
• Senate Bill 4 – Increasing the Homestead Exemption to $140,000 ($150,000 for Seniors): Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 5 – Combatting Dementia and Alzheimer’s – Establishing DPRIT (Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas): Signed into law.
• Senate Bill 6 – Increasing Texas’ Electric Grid Reliability: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 7 – Increasing Investments in Texas’ Water Supply: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 8 – Requiring Local Law Enforcement to Assist the Federal Government’s Deportation Efforts: Passed both chambers.
• Senate Bill 9 – Reforming Bail – Keeping Violent Criminals Off Our Streets: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 10 – Placing the Ten Commandments in School: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 11 – Protecting the Freedom to Pray in School: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 12 – Establishing a Parental Bill of Rights in Public Education: Passed both chambers.
• Senate Bill 13 – Guarding Against Inappropriate Books in Public Schools: Passed both chambers.
• Senate Bill 14 – Texas DOGE – Improving Government Efficiency: Signed into law.
• Senate Bill 15 – Removing Barriers to Housing Affordability: Passed both chambers.
• Senate Bill 16 – Stopping Non-Citizens from Voting: Left in House Calendars Committee.
• Senate Bill 17 – Stopping Foreign Adversary Land Grabs: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 18 – Stopping Drag Time Story Hour: Left on House General State Calendar.
• Senate Bill 19 – Stopping Taxpayer Dollars for Lobbyists: Left in the House State Affairs Committee.
• Senate Bill 20 – Stopping AI-Generated Child Pornography: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 21 – Establishing the Texas Bitcoin Reserve: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 22 – Establishing Texas as America’s Film Capital: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 23 – Removing the Cap on the Rainy Day Fund to Secure Texas’ Long-term Financial Future: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 24 – Educating Texas Students on the Horrors of Communism: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 25 – Making Texas Healthy Again: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 26 – Increasing Teacher Pay: Left in the House Public Education Committee.
• Senate Bill 27 – Establishing a Teacher Bill of Rights: Passed both chambers.
• Senate Bill 28 – Banning Lottery Couriers: Left in House Licensing and Administrative Committee.
• Senate Bill 29 – Texas: Open for Business: Signed into law.
• Senate Bill 30 – Curbing Nuclear Verdicts: Conference committee appointed.
• Senate Bill 31 – Life of the Mother Act: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 32 – Business Tax Relief: Left in the House Ways and Means Committee.
• Senate Bill 33 – Stopping Taxpayer-Funded Abortion Travel: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 34 – Wildfire Response: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 35 – Competing for Quality Roads: Left on House General State Calendar.
• Senate Bill 36 – Establishing a Homeland Security Division within [the Department of Public Safety]: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 37 – Reforming Faculty Senates: Passed both chambers.
• Senate Bill 38 – Stopping Squatters: Sent to Abbott.
• Senate Bill 39 – Protecting Texas Trucking: Left in the House Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee.
• Senate Bill 40 – Stopping Taxpayer-Funded Bail: Sent to Abbott.

Not every conservative priority passed, and I don’t agree with every bill (much less every part of every bill), but a lot of progress was made this legislative session. Dan Patrick’s senate seems much better at delivering conservative results than David Dewhurst’s senate ever was.

Columbia University failed to meet accreditation standards due to its inability to uphold civil rights law and punish harassment against Jewish students, the Department of Education announced Wednesday.

Office of Civil Rights (OCR) officials have notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the body that sets Columbia’s accreditation standards, that the university is “in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws and therefore fails to meet standards.” Administrators’ unwillingness to address months of anti-Israel activism on Columbia’s campus created an unsafe environment for Jewish students, the department added, putting the university in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data science, improving the quality and speed of decision-making, the resilience of
  digital networks, and operational effectiveness. Forecasts of when Artificial General Intelligence (Where AI matches or surpasses humans’ ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a range of situations unaided) will occur are uncertain but shortening, with profound implications for Defence.

• Robotics and autonomy, with armed forces increasingly using uncrewed and autonomous capabilities to generate mass and lethality.
• Enhanced precision weapons that mean targets can be struck with greater accuracy from ever
  greater ranges.

• Directed energy weapons, such as the UK’s DragonFire, which have the potential to reduce collateral damage and reliance on expensive ammunition.
• Hypersonic missiles, which, travelling at over five times the speed of sound, may offer greater range and greater ability to evade defences.
• Space-based capabilities that enable all aspects of modern operations. States are rapidly developing ways to disrupt military and civilian assets in and from space.
• Quantum. Advances in quantum computing offer the potential to break encryption, making secure communications much more difficult. Quantum technologies have the
  potential to reduce dependence on satellite-based GPS, which may be vulnerable to interference.

• Cyber threats that will become harder to mitigate as technology evolves, with AI, quantum technology, and the increasing dependence on satellite communications likely driving the most disruptive changes to the cyber threat landscape.
• Engineering biology that creates the potential to enhance the capacity of the armed forces through advances in medicine, healthcare, and wellbeing, possibilities for new energetic and explosive materials, as well as avenues for enormous harm in the shape of new pathogens and other weapons of mass destruction.

Ono, who curiously was the only finalist advanced by the search committee for the job, came with their unanimous recommendation on May 4 and was unanimously approved by the university’s Board of Trustees on May 27. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has pledged that Florida is “where woke goes to die,” remained oddly reticent about Ono—stating first that he trusted the process, and later that the governors (15 of the 17 governors were appointed by DeSantis), should follow their consciences in deciding Ono’s fate.

Other Florida conservatives, including Senator Rick Scott and Congressmen Greg Steube, Byron Donalds, and Jimmy Patronis, denounced the appointment and outright called for a negative vote.

Ono’s rejection by the Florida Board of Governors is an unprecedented, but legally and procedurally correct, use of its powers. Ono’s demise followed a polite but charged meeting in Orlando on the campus of Central Florida University. Public comments included scathing denunciations and trenchant questions about his candidacy based on his well-documented record for supporting DEI, critical race theory, and radical gender ideology, among other leftist shibboleths.

DeSantis should have done more to nip this candidacy in the bud.

“We’ve talked about this” 😅 pic.twitter.com/bgkE1uz6ko

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) June 3, 2025

(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)