Lance Pickle

Nothing to see here...

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@Tepper I like Mountain Dew and I like cream soda, so I'm just gonna stop there

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@Tepper @ashley_pickle12 @sweetpickle94 is the swing coach and caddy that really makes the magic happen

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

The quality of this dialog could not be overstated

[The Next Round @NextRoundLive]

Following Texas' loss at Kentucky, Sean Miller dropped an early candidate for soundbite of the year:

"We have a virus called fouling... We will foul the living 💩 out of you... You describe the foul and the team that I'm coaching will commit it."

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@Tepper Ozona Express

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

Me signing up for Consumer Cellular because of this add

[Brett McMurphy @Brett_McMurphy]

Mike Gundy reenacts famous rant in hilarious “Consumer Cellular” commercial: “Big wireless wants to come after me? I’m a man, I’m not 40. I’m 58. Why would I over pay? … Big wireless makes me want to puke!”

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@ashley_pickle12 @Tepper @Matt_Stepp817

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@Tepper @dctf @Chicken_Express @GPowersScout @GavinMoritz @malloryhartley @Carter_Yates16 Getting the news you don't get to call the Evant game next week.

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@TheWolf6674 How am I not the answer?

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@MattSchobel I'm so full

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

My surrogate fathers

[Terrence K. Williams @w_terrence]

👇

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@TheWolf6674 8N for the win

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

I'm concerned that many people do not understand the historical and institutional context in which the DOGE labor reforms are unfolding. They look at this as if these are some random, chaotic, arbitrary, strange, and even cruel measures to impose on a devoted civil service.

The reality is very different, and I'm not even sure that Elon entirely understands this. For more than a century, even dating back to 1883, the civil service has grown and grown without check from the elected branch, either the presidency or the legislature . The bureaucracies have ballooned from a few to 450 or so. The bloat and absurdities have grown too.

Get this: no one has ever known what to do about it. Not Coolidge, not Hoover, not Nixon, not Reagan, not Clinton, no one. No president has been able to crack this nut. The only reforms ever to have made it through are those that make the administrative state bigger, never smaller.

Countless cabinet secretaries have come and gone, always with the intention of making a change but leaving saddened, demoralized, outwitted, outgunned, and ultimately devoured.

No president has seriously taken on this problem because they simply did not know how. The unions are powerful, the intimidation from the deep institutional knowledge is overwhelming, the fear of the media as been powerful, and every single president comes to power vaguely feeling threatened by the intelligence agencies. The industries that have captured every single agency were also far too powerful to unseat or control.

This combination of institutional inertia has blocked serious reform for a full century. No one has dared. No one has even had a theory or strategy about what to do about this problem. It had become so terrible that most people in politics have simply surrendered, like homeowners who know there are rats in the basement and bats in the attic but long ago gave up trying to fix the issue.

All this time, the American people have felt themselves ever more oppressed, weighed upon, taxed and regulated, spied upon, brow beaten, and otherwise overwhelmed. Voting never made any difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies ruled all.

The Biden years underscored the point. We didn't even need a conscious and present executive. We only needed a figurehead to pretend to be president, just like the Soviet premiers in the old days. The institutions ran everything and the people controlled nothing.

How to deal with this? Trump alone figured it out in his last term: he simply took charge of the agencies in a limited way. There were screams of horror and plots galore. They performed a long stream of clever schemes to destroy him and show him who is boss, which is not the democratically elected president but the forces behind the scenes.

The job of the president, goes the message from all the insiders, is to PRETEND to be in charge but not actually do anything meaningful. Shut up, mug up, obey, and disturb nothing, let the administrative state do its thing without oversight or disruption, and then you will get your honorary library and bestselling autobiography and go down in history as great.

Trump refused the deal and look what happened.

Four years have gone by and Trump is back again, this time with a determination to slay this beast, one that he knows all-to-well. The efforts of DOGE and MAHA and MAGA are epic in scope, breaking a century of pathetic acquiescence toward the deep, middle, and shallow states, at last using moral courage to confront the problem head on, come what may.

They are profoundly aware that they MUST act fast and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, else we will default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded system runs things behind the scenes.

It has been this way for TOO LONG. The voters this time have demanded change, and mustered the faith to believe that change is possible. This is precisely what DOGE is attempting, to make good on a promise, a promise that for once the voters actually believed was credible.

They simply must succeed. There might never be another chance. The way of failure is the path everyone knows the US was on, toward economic stagnation, political scolerosis, and eventual irrelevance in the unfolding of the next stage of social evolution.

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@Tepper @ashley_pickle12 Welcome to the club

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@CravenMike Congratulations!

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

Keep the ball, I've got a whole bucket full #IYKYK

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@Carter_Yates16 Congrats!

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@hinojosa_david Not this one

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@hinojosa_david Welcome to the club slow poke.

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@hinojosa_david Thanks for tracking this down

[Lance Pickle @PickleLance]

@WillieWilk23 @ImErinHartigan @bswhealth So happy for the three of you ❤️