Russ Vought is the engineer behind Musk Chainsaw 1 and Trump Chainsaw 2. Trump's newest threat is to take advantage of the shutdown and to make the shutdown even worse by firing thousands of fed workers, not just furloughing them.. Who is Vought? He was appointed by Trump to run the fed personnel policies as director of the Office of Management and Budget.. He is also one of the engineers of Project 2025 to turn career service employees into political appointees, subject to the whims of hiring and firing by whoever is in the Oval Office (Trump). The purpose is to turn the "deep state" into Trump or ideological loyal to the Heritage Foundation, into Trump's deep state. Project 2025 had planned to institute a plan to end career service protections for the lower ranks of the fed workforce with Schedule F, but that was a slow process subject to court appeals. Chainsaw 1 solved the problem by just closing agencies en masse, and Chainsaw 2 would continue the 2025 goals of replacing non-political career service with their political loyalists
WELCOME TO THE BLOG This blog reflects my views of current political issues.. It is also an archive for columns in the Sky Hi News 2011 to November 2019. Winter Park Times 2019 to 2021.(paper publishing suspended in 2021) My Facebook page, the muftic forum, posts blog links, comments, and sharing. Non-political Facebook page: felicia muftic. Subscribe for free on Substack: https://feliciamuftic.substack.com Blog postings are continuously being edited and updated.
Thursday, October 2, 2025
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
The GOP defense of sending military to cities stops crime. Seriously?
Rep. Lisa McClain(R-MI) on Morning Joe this AM made a spirited defense for using the military to stop crime in major cities (those with Democratic mayors, I notice). Her argument: when the military went into Washington, DC, the murder rate not only went down, but there were no murders reported while they were there. Therefore, she argues, just sending them in to other cities works.(DC has a special federal status that makes this legal, which states and cities do not have.) A follow-up question I would ask if this means for permanently reducing the murder rate, is this a pitch for permanent military occupation of cities?
Or is the answer something else, like funding more local resources and police to combat crime? The next question I would ask is what has the Trump regime done to fund more local police resources in cities. I ran across this information at DOJ Funding Update: A Deeper Look at the Cuts - Council on Criminal Justice The Trump DOJ has cut $500 million in grant funding to improving police forces since January 2025.
- "In April, the Trump Administration terminated 373 grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP).
- The defunded grants were initially valued at about $820 million, but many were multiyear grants in various stages of payout and implementation. The Administration has rescinded the remaining balances of these awards, which a CCJ analysis estimates at about $500 million.
- The terminated grants provided federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution, victims’ services, juvenile justice and child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice system enhancements, research and evaluation, and other state- and local-level public safety functions."
What part of the GOP is hard core MAGA
Trump has a 43 percent approval rating per recent polls. If it is a question of democracy vs dictatorship/authoritarianism, 55% of registered Republicans want a strong man president...which is the question one poll asked. If that is the case, if I had the general feeling...not an exact estimate, but between 30% and 35% of all voters were hard-core MAGA, and the 15 percent are either unengaged, squishy, self-interested business types. Poll by NY Times 9/30/2025: Trump has support of about 90% of registered Republicans...consistent and unchanged in the summer.
The puzzle: Why does Trump continue to consolidate and energize his base instead of reaching out to add to his base? By using fear and favor and cheating, he can afford to ignore the popular vote. My guess is that he thinks that by lies, threatening with military suppression, overt racism, anti migrant mass deportation, and suppression, and limiting the ability of targeted opposition demographic groups to vote, using methods to federalize elections, and above all, political gerrymandering, he can tip the vote to him. If so he does not have to worry about the 55-plus who would turn up on election day to comprise the popular vote.
What's the answer for Democrats? How can they appeal to the 10% to 15 squish and solidify the vote for them? Exactly as Trump won in 2024: It's the economy, stupid...the cost of living. .. groceries, housing. For that reason, one of the greatest factors in the cost of living of the struggling middle class is the cost of health insurance and the affordability of health care in general. It tops the concerns list. Clever GOP. Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare will take place after the 2026 midterms, so the task of the Democrats is to make the warning stick that what is coming is bad and the GOP is to be blamed. For the sceptics, warnings that healthcare costs will rise is only part of the message. For many, only actually feeling the pain counts; warnings are political noise. That is the reason the government shutdown is over health care costs this week: it is a way to dramatize and pin the issue on the GOP for what is coming later, as warnings. However, the actual experience of the pain will begin within a month or two as many get the actual figures of their health insurance in December and January when the cost of Obamacare/ACA will increase by painful and large percentages. This is not a question of warning of 2027, but immediately the pain will be felt in 2025 and 2026. in time for the midterms.. The GOP big beautiful bill dropped all federal subsidies to the ACA, and the projections that steps must be taken now for providers to be ready by 2027, so that even then, the pain will be felt by providers like rural health have to cut back in 2026..
MUFTIC FORUM BLOG: Are we there yet? Yes. America is no longer a democracy, the land of the free
From an August 1, 2025, Facebook posting, my opinion of how much of the MAGA base is motivated by racism. Strictly, my opinion. For some time, I have suspected that the Trump regime's mass deportation policies and executive orders were motivated by racism and discrimination against those with roots from south of our border or brown people from elsewhere, I have also suspected that after you peel back all of the reasons MAGA supporters use to justify their support of Trump, economy, business interests, religious beliefs, and despite Trump and friends' immorality and greed, there is a large element of the issue left that is migrant deportation. Everything else but mass deportation seems irrelevant to them. A district court judge just called out Trump's attempt to end all temporary protective visas for migrant refugees fleeing violence, persecution, or natural disasters, racist and discriminatory, and put a temporary hold on the execution of the removal of those holding such visas. The purpose of the special visas was to give refugee status until the conditions in their home from which they fled had improved. The judge found that the condition of their home countries of the plaintiffs had not improved. The evidence of racial discrimination was the words of the Trump regime's administrators themselves. No doubt this will go through the appeal process to end up in the lap of "his" Supreme Court, but the damning language from the judge needs to be cited. For those who protest this ruling, first look in your own mirror. (as of October 2025, the Supreme Court usually sides with the Trump administration on similar issues, but lower courts keep ruling otherwise on temporary protective visas. The issue is still in flux.)
My observations: October 1, 2025: The president calling for active or national guard military and ordering them to Chicago and Portland, where local and state officials object, is a sheer bullhorn appeal to the racists. It is not to fight crime or chaos or cities are burning, when current videos put a lie to that, particularly when crime statistics show 20 to 25% decreases per capita recently, but it will appeal to the bigotry in the MAGA base and to fool them to thinking this is reality, when it is not. Deployment of military to do domestic policing is not only not their training skills in this, they have none, but it seems an obvious violation of the Posse Comitatus provisions in the Constitution and laws of the land that only exempt such measures if there is an insurrection. There may be crime, but it is not an insurrection. A lower court on the use of the military in Los Angeles so ruled. Judge rules Trump illegally deployed National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
This isn't just anti free speech, or fascism; this is stalinism
As Trump directs his DOJ and others in his regime to take revenge and retribution, to go and find something he can get or make their lives miserable, what comes to mind is the following:.Trump just signed a National Security Directive NSPM-7) that will secretly get you on his retribution/revenge hit list for future prosecution if you even speak "anti American ( no definition, but assume it means "anti-Trump") or "anti-Christian", (meaning the evangelical branch or white Christian nationalism, of course.) This is as frightening as it gets. It is not just anti-first amendment, it is not even fascism: it is Stalinism.