Author Archive: Stephen Green

“RELEASE IT ALL,” THEY TOLD ME. “BUT NOT THAT,” THEY SAID:

WITH RUTHLESS EFFICIENCY: How Trump broke California’s grip on the auto market.

The Golden State’s power to shape the national car market is in tatters thanks to Trump 2.0. Where it took federal officials nearly 18 months in Trump’s first term to revoke the state’s nation-leading electric vehicle sales mandate, they accomplished it in less than five months this time around — and California has yet to come up with a way to counter it.

The result is a stark reversal from Trump’s first term, when California repeatedly slowed or blunted federal rollbacks — and often outmaneuvered a White House mired in internal dysfunction. Now, he is running roughshod over one of the signature policy priorities of this heavily Democratic state.

The infighting, sloppy rulemaking and a lack of clear policy goals that marked Trump’s first administration have been replaced by an aggressively overhauled government workforce stocked with MAGA loyalists and an eagerness to test the bounds of executive authority. Backed by more-seasoned agency staff, congressional Republicans in lockstep with Trump’s agenda and a playbook in the form of Project 2025 — the conservative Heritage Foundation’s comprehensive policy blueprint — Trump 2.0 has looked like a completely different animal.

It’s been a head-spinning 2025, and I can’t wait to see what this White House does in 2026.

COMMIES STEAL: North Korean agents are trying to infiltrate Amazon, chief security officer says.

“Their objective is typically straightforward: get hired, get paid, and funnel wages back to fund the regime’s weapons programs,” Stephen Schmidt wrote in a LinkedIn post on Friday, adding that applicants were using fake or stolen identities to pursue remote IT jobs in the U.S. and worldwide.

“We’ve stopped more than 1,800 suspected DPRK operatives from joining since April 2024,” he said, using the acronym for the secretive communist state’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “We’ve detected 27% more DPRK-affiliated applications quarter over quarter this year,” he added.

The fraud was detected by Amazon’s AI-powered application screening system combined with manual verification by its staff, he said.

Schmidt said that the agents often use so-called “laptop farms” — computers physically based in the U.S. but operated remotely from abroad — to conceal their true locations.

I’m less concerned with the money they took out than with the code they might have left behind.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump’s Economy Delivers Some Early Christmas Joy. “To the surprise of absolutely no one who has paid attention to the irresponsible, hostile hacks in the media, the word ‘unexpected’ was used a lot in the reporting of this news. It’s the same old thing: good economic news under a Republican president is unexpected, as is bad economic news when a Democrat is in the White House. They don’t even bother to avail themselves of a free online thesaurus to find a synonym. Thanks to the trademark lack of self-awareness on the left, the idiots don’t know that ‘unexpected’ is a running joke.”

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:

WAR AND PEACE: EU’s roughly $105B loan allows Ukraine to keep fighting Russia, changes dynamics of any peace deal.

The outcome, which was the result of difficult and uncertain negotiations, provides dramatic support to Ukraine’s medium-term fiscal viability. It means Kyiv can continue paying soldiers, maintaining domestic weapons production, and resist the temptation to accept an early and unfavorable settlement with Moscow.

The loan is structured so that repayment is designed to be covered by future Russian reparations or proceeds from frozen Russian assets.

The European Union and over 30 other countries signed what is known as the Council of Europe convention establishing an international claims mechanism for Ukrainian losses, a plan designed to increase pressure on Russia and reduce the possibility there could be a “normalization” of the country’s relations with Ukraine without consequences.

Exit quote: “The loans are likely to provide enough support for the Ukrainians to continue their fight for another year or more. And perhaps just as significant, they represent a rare example of European states acting in their own interests without any outsourcing to Washington.”

Trump’s tough-love approach to Europe is working.

RESULTS:

UGH: Former Republican Senator Announces Grim Cancer Diagnosis. “There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of Advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.”

FASTER? PLEASE! Isaacman emphasizes accelerating NASA programs as he takes agency’s reins.

“We cannot achieve our objectives the way they’ve been done in recent years,” he said, citing the “absolutely impressive speeds” of China’s space activities. “We must do all we can to minimize the bureaucratic drag that can slow us down.”

That effort includes companies and international partners working with NASA, particularly on plans to return humans to the moon. “We will prepare for the inevitable return by working with our commercial and international partners to ensure they’re aligned with our programmatic objectives and acting with the urgency needed” to deliver Artemis elements, he said.

Isaacman highlighted an executive order signed by President Trump on Dec. 18 titled “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” which includes provisions calling for a human return to the lunar surface by 2028 and the establishment of initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030.

“In my view, it is one of the most significant commitments to America’s space program by any administration since the Kennedy era,” Isaacman said. He attended the signing ceremony in the Oval Office shortly after being sworn in.

The agency needs a good shakeup, and an entrepreneur/astronaut has the skills, experience, and cred to get it done.

TURNAROUND: 3D Printing Sends Broken F-15 Back to Action Within Hours.

US Air Force and Marine Corps repair teams have joined forces to send a damaged F-15 back to flight status in just a few hours, far ahead of the original several-month timeline.

The 18th Maintenance Group (18 MXG) at Kadena Air Base in Japan reached out to Marine Aircraft Logistics Squadron 36 (MALS-36) to leverage its on-site additive manufacturing equipment in repairing a malfunctioning cooling duct.

Within 12 hours, the teams printed, delivered, and installed two prototypes that restored the duct to operational condition, beating engineers’ original four-month repair estimate.

By roughly 119-and-a-half days. Impressive.

INCENTIVES: Noem offers $3,000, free flight for migrants who sign up to leave.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem raised her incentives on Monday for illegal migrants who volunteer to return home before the end of the year as part of a program to lower deportation costs for taxpayers.

Noem had a new offer of $3,000 stipend and free flight home if they sign up to self-deport through the CBP Home app by the end of the year. That’s up from a previous offer of $1,000.

She said 1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported, including tens of thousands who used the CBP Home program since January.

“During the Christmas Season, the U.S. taxpayer is so generously TRIPLING the incentive to leave voluntarily for those in this country illegally – offering a $3,000 exit bonus, but just until the end of the year,” Noem said. “Illegal aliens should take advantage of this gift and self-deport because if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return.”

Self-deportation is less expensive than average cost to arrest, detain, and remove an illegal alien.

Offer expires soon…