Month: January 2025

Musk Mulls Dodging DOGE Goals

Buck Banks

$2 $1 trillion

Tech billionaire Elon Musk said Wednesday that his budget-cutting effort on behalf of President-elect Donald Trump would most likely not find $2 trillion in savings, backtracking on a goal he set earlier as co-head of a new advisory body, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, NBC News reported. Musk told political strategist Mark Penn in an interview broadcast on X that the $2 trillion figure was a “best-case outcome” and that he thought there was only a “good shot” at cutting half that.

Trump to Issue 100 Executive Orders on Day One

Buck Banks

100

“President-elect Donald Trump is preparing nearly 100 executive orders for when he returns to the White House on Jan. 20,” the Washington Post reports. “Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma), appearing on Fox News, said Trump relayed plans to take action on immigration and energy, among other issues, during a meeting with Republican senators in Washington on Wednesday night.”

Drop These Words from Your Vocab, Period

Pensito Editors

Pensito Illustration

The not-vaunted, totally non–Ivy League Lake Superior State University has dropped its annual list of banished words, and you should 100% exile them from your vocabulary for the duration of this era, period.

First utilized in 1976 as a cringe-worthy publicity stunt to promote the little-known bastion of higher education by its public relations director, W.T. “Bill” Rabe, a Detroit-area PR guru (can we please banish that phrase?!), the list was released “as a safeguard against misuse, overuse, and uselessness of the English language.” The list was a game changer for LSSU, and has netted the university publicity for half a century.

Here’s the 2025 list of banished words:

1. cringe
2. game changer
3. era
4. dropped
5. IYKYK (if you know, you know)
6. sorry not sorry
7. skibidi
8. 100%
9. utilize
10. period

When it comes to this list, IYKYK, and if not, sorry not sorry, so go flush these overused and abused terms down your skibidi toilet and be done with them.

Trump Inauguration Grift Nets $170 Million

Buck Banks

$170 million

“President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural committee is no longer selling tickets for major donors to attend his swearing-in and accompanying private events in Washington,“ the New York Times reports. “The committee has raised over $170 million… The haul is so big that some seven-figure donors have been placed on wait lists or have been told they probably will not receive V.I.P. tickets at all because the events are at capacity.”

Donald Has an Elon Problem

Buck Banks

“Trump can flick Marco Rubio aside like dandruff; brush Mike Johnson off like an errant crumb; turn Pam Bondi into Nikki Haley by midnight tonight. His orbit is filled with botoxed disposables who hang upon his favor; courtiers who can be stripped of their livelihoods and status — and exiled from MAGA altogether — if they offend the Orange God King. Trump can’t fire JD Vance, but he could destroy his truckling veep’s political future with a single Truth Social post. … Not so with Elon Musk. … Musk is the world’s richest man; a cult-figure in his own right, and the master of his social media domain. Now, in part thanks to Trump’s own patronage, he also holds sway over much of his domestic agenda via DOGE. If that were not enough, Musk is rapidly fashioning himself into a global power broker — with a decidedly Trump-like flavor. … Indeed, the two men seem to be dueling for attention — vying with one another with competing distractions, as Musk conducts his own independent foreign policy.”

— Charlie Sykes on Substack