"We come living and being in our own bubbles." The post How Lou Reed became Lars Ulrich’s “musical soulmate” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

We’ve been conditioned for decades by the political class — and its members on both sides of the aisle are doing what they can to reinforce that conditioning today — to regard any budgetary impasse that results in a temporary interruption of status quo bureaucratic governance as a disaster. So when the government went into shutdown mode Wednesday after a third attempt to pass a continuing resolution that would fund the government as is for a month or two, there they were, caterwauling about the Parade of Horribles that a shutdown would unleash. It’s what the Capitol press corps expects, it’s what the political consultants demand, and it’s what Official Washington decrees as the only allowable narrative. And it’s nonsense. We’ve had government shutdowns in virtually every decade of modern American existence. They never last long, they never do any permanent damage, and they’re never even remembered a year later. The only possible exceptions were the shutdowns during the Obama years, when the president did everything he could to inflict pain on ordinary Americans so as to make us notice the refusal of the Republicans to cater to his budgetary whims. Shutdowns are nothing. They’re inconsequential. When the feds aren’t closing open-air monuments like the ones in Washington to our fallen veterans, regular folks don’t even notice. And with Donald Trump in the White House, nobody is really noticing this one. Well, that’s not quite true, is it? This shutdown actually has a brand. It’s the Sombrero Shutdown, because of this: That was a “deepfake video” that the president shared on Truth Social starring Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the king and crown jester of the shutdown court, and while it set off spasms of outrage among the Democrats and their votaries, the rest of the country seemed to have been greatly amused. And Jeffries, who was festooned with a sombrero and clip art moustache in Trump’s meme to give added flavor to the fact that the Democrats are dragging the country through this dorky psychdrama over federal dollars being spent to subsidize healthcare for illegal aliens, threw a fit on camera over having been made fun of. Which… wasn’t a good idea, because it brought down another troll-bombing run on Truth Social… And a national media bored with the usual unserious arguments and fake outrage on both sides picked up on the sombrero-and-moustache AI ensemble, and before you knew it there was this exchange as Vice President JD Vance showed up at the White House press briefing to tell the administration’s side of the story: If @RepJeffries helps us open the government right now, the sombrero memes will stop. This is my solemn promise. pic.twitter.com/pL99Wsun4i — JD Vance (@JDVance) October 1, 2025 And now, it has become a cultural sensation… Chuck Schumer & Hakeem Jeffries are really taking this Sombrero thing too far. Cultural Appropriation? ? pic.twitter.com/NYPP2TIr0g — ?erias (@xerias_x) October 2, 2025 Long live the Hakeem Jeffries sombrero memes ? pic.twitter.com/MlwHa00uHG — Joel Varela (@JoelVarela79) October 1, 2025 And one more, because why not… “The fact that a sombrero meme of Hakeem Jeffries has Democrats melting down tells you everything. Trump lives rent free in their heads 24/7 ?” pic.twitter.com/uWLK0XxAlb — Dark Patriot (@BasedWakeninq) October 1, 2025 It’s everywhere. Oh, but we shouldn’t be making light of such a serious situation, you say. Really? What about this is serious? Schumer, Jeffries, and the rest of the Marxist vanguard on Capitol Hill thought it was a good idea to jack up Trump, Mike Johnson, and John Thune for $1.5 trillion in government swag, pretty much all of it being gains won in the Big Beautiful Bill, for a seven-week continuing resolution. That isn’t a serious gambit. It’s one of the stupidest political moves ever made. And if there’s any sanity or justice to our politics, it will be repaid in permanent loss of leverage by the Democrats over the budget process. After all… Trump teased on Truth Social that he would be meeting with Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought to – as he warned Democrats he would do – reevaluate the necessity of various government agencies. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote. As a potential shutdown loomed, the administration cautioned Democrats that if they didn’t sign on to Republicans’ short stopgap funding bill and prevent a shutdown, more federal employees would lose their jobs. The OMB sent a letter to federal agencies last week directing them to take a critical look at where they might be able to shed more employees. “With respect to those Federal programs whose funding would lapse and which are otherwise unfunded, such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out,” the letter reads. “Agencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities (PPAs) that satisfy all three of the following conditions: (1) discretionary funding lapses on October 1, 2025; (2) another source of funding, such as H.R. 1 (Public Law 119-21) is not currently available; and (3) the PPA is not consistent with the President’s priorities.” Every federal position eliminated, every program excised, shrinks the budget baseline and delivers exponential savings to the American taxpayer specifically in the out years — programs that no longer exist no longer get artificially inflated by automatic spending increases. Trump and Vought now have the power to make permanent reform to government spending that Congress lacks the will to do, and the fun part is that congressional deadlock means Trump’s changes will be permanent so long as America isn’t stupid enough to put someone like Gavin Newsom or Wes Moore in the White House. This is an unalloyed good thing. Vought is already excising stupid Green New Deal spending that was going to blue-state political grifters, including some $18 billion that was scheduled to be spent in Schumer’s New York. So sad. I wrote this at RVIVR on Wednesday: But to fully create advantages out of the shutdown, the advice I’d offer is this: lean in. And specifically at this point, do NOT pursue a continuing resolution to reopen the government. One was presented to the Democrats; they voted it down via the filibuster and created the shutdown. They had their chance, now it’s time to think bigger and leave them in the dust. Instead of trying to negotiate with them on a short-term spending measure, work on the 12 appropriations bills and pursue regular order on the budget. You’ll never have better leverage to get a true budget passed for next year than you have right now. Three of the 12 appropriations bills are in conference right now, and they should be the first priority. Pass the conference reports of those appropriations bills in both houses, and now the government is not fully shut down. The other nine bills have moved out of committee and are awaiting votes on the House floor. So move them to passage and send them to the Senate. Do that, and Republicans become the party of a regular budget and not emergency, jammed-up CR’s. Which is where you want to be. In normal circumstances, this would be an open invitation to obstruction by the Democrats. But right now, when their obstruction has already shut down the government, the leverage is extreme. They’ll beg for a CR but they’ve already filibustered it, so now they can have the appropriations bills and their objections will have to be specific and germane. That is not the field they want to play on. Don’t fall into the CR trap. You offered a CR in good faith and it was rebuffed. So now drag the process through regular order and let’s see just how badly they want to obstruct it while Russ Vought is firing all their friends in the bureaucracy and shrinking the budget baseline. That advice stands. Pass the appropriations bills. Not the CR. Use this shutdown to finally get to regular order and force the Democrats to come to the table on those 12 bills — with their backs to the wall, because if those bills are the only budgetary game in town, they’ve got no other choice but to work with them. And let’s finally explode this stupid myth that a government shutdown is a catastrophe. It isn’t. It never has been. Wall Street is unmoved, Polymarket says most expect we’ll be here awhile, and America is laughing at sombrero memes starring Temu Obama. Two weeks of those memes, and we might just have an American revival. We sure as hell will get to regular budget order. The Sombrero Shutdown is a good moment. Let’s relax and enjoy it. MORE from Scott McKay: The Spectacle Ep. 278: Trump vs. the UN: The Truth They Can’t Handle The Spectacle Ep. 279: Kamala Harris’ Book Tour of Excuses Emotional Terrorism Doesn’t Work Anymore, and That’s a Real Problem for the Left

Earlier this week, Uncle Sam’s red-white-and-blue getup, a la Cinderella’s dress, morphed into dirty rags once the clock struck midnight. If an unpropitious way to start the fiscal year, it seems more honest than the 365 days that preceded. October 1, after all, admitted that the federal government is broke. The days before it, a la Kevin Bacon in Animal House, insisted “All is well!” The counterintuitive, Baconesque, if you will, message of the government shutdown is: Remain calm. All is well! The real problem, of course, occurred not on October 1, when rules forced the federal government to spend within its means. It occurred on all those days when legislators could spend all sorts of money that the treasury lacked. The federal budget deficit reached $2 trillion for the 2025 fiscal year. This occurred because legislators spent $7 trillion — about a quarter of the gross domestic product. This pushed the national debt close to $38 trillion. Recklessness, then, occurred on all the days when legislators spent money not in the treasury. Prudence, even if of a false, forced variety, occurred during these last few days in which legislators could not spend money on all sorts of things we cannot afford. A government shutdown means, like so many Washington euphemisms (Washiphemisms?), not a shutdown of the government but instead a government that prioritizes spending. After all, Social Security checks do not stop and the post office remains open. The Environmental Protection Agency, on the other hand, goes on leave. Is all that so horrible? It sounds to a lot of people like a government that acts more in concordance with the Constitution and basic rules of accounting. The progressives of all parties, their media enablers, and so many others push the idea that a lack of money to spend, i.e., a government “shutdown,” is the problem. Addicts speak in such terms when they run out of cash to fuel their habit. Clear-thinking individuals grasp that what the addict — heroin, spending, or otherwise — views as the solution is really the problem. And the “problem” increasingly strikes them as the solution. Ultimately, Americans outside of the Washington, D.C., area do not worry all that much that the federal government now closes this museum or furloughs those workers. It does not affect them, except to illustrate that so much of what they spend their tax dollars on remains extraneous to their lives. Democrats hoist themselves on their own petard here. This amounts to the third shutdown under Donald Trump (none occurred under Joe Biden). By normalizing shutdowns, Democrats ensure that Americans no longer fear them — or fear what happens when one must walk without a ranger in sight in Acadia National Park. The takeaway for most Americans? We don’t need all this stuff that progressives insist we need. A better strategy for progressives occurs on the local level. Whenever local do-gooders want more tax dollars, they do not threaten to lay off the diversity officer in the local library. No, they tell everyone that the situation demands that the town forfeit the high school football team’s season or impose onerous user fees on student athletes if they do not get their fix of higher property taxes. The federal government, in contrast, stops nonessential services. This lacks an oh-no quality. It’s like a horror movie that casts a ladybug as the villain. If, instead of nonessential government services, politicians tied the government shutdown to, say, a ban on fun-size Halloween Krackels, YouTube videos of baby Orangutans, or NFL games, then Americans would care. As it stands now, the closure of the visitor center at the Capitol does not seem to move the needle with many Americans. And the shutdown seems to give the Trump administration ideas about permanentizing it for some nonessential programs. The Democrats played into their own checkmate here. READ MORE: ESPN Puts Its Thumbs on the Scale Americans Would Care If the NFL Shut Down. This?

Back in the 1980s, maestro P. J. O’Rourke wrote a riotous piece in Harper’s called Ship of Fools. Our favorite satirist signed up for a Peace Cruise on the Volga River. He traveled aboard the Alexander Pushkin with a boatload of Nation subscribers. It must have been about as exciting as a lobotomy. He described the landscape as “a stunted, overgrown field, unplanted, without grass, without anything. I was surrounded by equally barren heads.” The plan was for everyone to lecture on peace, and the Soviets even sent along a few “peace experts” to help. The report was hilarious — mocking the geriatric far-left activists of the day, who sincerely believed they were visiting the world of the future. Nearly 50 years later, the far left is still chartering ships. I didn’t need to sign up for the Global Sumud Flotilla to write this column; now the ships come equipped with webcams that stream nonstop, while each girl on board spends her days broadcasting live on TikTok — either spewing anti-Semitic rants, begging for money, or twerking to Caribbean beats. Among the “eminent figures in international diplomacy” on the Global Sumud Flotilla, most of which has since been intercepted by Israel, was the great scientist Greta Thunberg — renowned expert on hot tempers. Greta had been furious at her hippie shipmates for joking around during what she insisted was a mission destined to change the course of humanity. I suppose Columbus’ voyage, compared to the Global Sumud Flotilla, was just a tiny, irrelevant footnote in history. Incidentally, Ada Colau — another activist and former mayor of Barcelona — looks exactly like Christopher Columbus, which may explain why they brought her along. The flotilla’s “mission,” crewed by millionaire communists with a fondness for weed, was to break the Israeli naval blockade. To achieve this, they armed themselves with a handful of slogans that barely rhyme, giant poster boards scrawled with “Free Gaza,” and the military poise of Captain Greta Thunberg. Earlier this month, the pagan procession set sail from Barcelona, proudly billing itself as “the largest humanitarian flotilla in history.” They lasted about 40 minutes before turning back, terrified of the waves. Half the hippies were seasick and then realized they had forgotten to pack enough Dramamine — earning the flotilla its new nickname: the Dramamine Flotilla. In reality, most of the boats just swapped places around the harbor, sailing long enough to film a decent TikTok story. The flotilla’s activist-influencers have been spotted dancing, singing, and streaming live in a strange state of euphoria. Leading the charge is Spain’s Ana Alcalde — renamed “Barbie Gaza” — who faithfully chronicled every daily mishap online. Barbie Gaza, 46, converted to Islam after marrying a police officer in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, with whom she has six children. She dances, shrieks, and sometimes streams herself sobbing when, say, the waves are too high — or when the crushed ice runs out for the mojitos. The Spanish government — never one to pass up an opportunity to humiliate itself — suddenly announced it would send a Navy ship to “protect” the Marijuana Flotilla from possible Israeli attacks. The activists howled with joy, instantly declaring the war won as they imagined the Navy firing broadsides at Israel. Then the ship’s actual orders leaked to the press: Do not engage in combat, not even if Israel machine-guns the flotilla. Ha! Even as a ghost, Sánchez manages to be a coward. Israel, meanwhile, has said it uncovered evidence in Gaza that Hamas helped finance the flotilla. There have also been defections among the activists — thanks to Islamists on board who were horrified by the festive customs of their comrades. Their indignation only deepened when they discovered many of the activists were LGBT. The Islamists drew a line: It’s them or us. To their credit, they didn’t toss anyone overboard — restraint they wouldn’t bother with in Iran. Barbie Gaza even appeared live from the ship on Spanish television. Asked about the Oct. 7 atrocities, she dismissed the rapes as “Israeli hoaxes,” then topped herself in psychedelic disgrace by claiming one kidnapped woman actually felt ugly because she hadn’t been raped: “One even said she felt unattractive because they hadn’t done anything to her — they hadn’t touched her.” You might think Barbie Gaza is a lone lunatic. Wrong. She’s the template. This is the kind of person who opposes Israel. Meanwhile, the last hours of the flotilla dragged on in deep melancholy. Trump has reached a historic peace deal with Israel. Dozens of countries — including Arab ones — support it. Hamas and the Palestinian leadership are considering it. And yet the flotilla, the Spanish government, and a few other fools stand firmly against it. I hate to admit it, because I’ve grown oddly fond of these hippies, but without war the last remaining boat in the flotilla would have to return home. No more nights of drinking and debauchery along the Mediterranean coast. We can’t let that happen. No more last-minute hookups, no more Titanic poses at the bow — Palestinian scarf and dreadlocks blowing in the breeze. Worst of all, they’d have to get real jobs. We must abolish the slavery of iPhone hippies! My solidarity is with them. I sincerely hope Hamas comes to its senses and rejects Trump’s plan, if only to save the vacation plans of those aboard the last boat of the Global Sumud Flotilla. And I hope it for our sake too: Because if that entire crowd comes home, they’ll go back to being a nuisance on dry land. And then I’ll be the one forced to escape to the ocean.

Well of course they would say this. And for a reason.  Politically speaking, President Trump has taken the Democrats to the woodshed more times than can be counted. The economy hums. The U.S. is not at war. America’s cities are being cleaned up from the sewers Democrat mayors have opened. One could go on. Yet with all of that — or maybe because of all of that — here are prominent Democrats on the president. • Rep. Madeleine Dean, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said the other day, “The president is unhinged. He is unwell.” • Democrat Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas said that Trump supporters are “sick” and that the country has a mental health crisis due to Trump’s presidency.  • One-time Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci, who long ago broke bitterly with Trump, said this: “Trump’s obviously got something wrong with him. I would say to [British Prime Minister] Keir Starmer the guy is unwell and he’s surrounded by willing sycophants that want to pretend that he’s not unwell.” • MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, a longtime leftist, has said a recent Trump speech to military leaders shows the president to be “deranged.” And on — and on and on — goes this nonsense. What these comments and others from Democrats in fact really do is vividly illustrate that it is the Democrats and American Left who are, in fact, “unwell,” “deranged,” and “sick.” A case in point was the Democrats’ insistence that then-President Joe Biden was just A-OK and more than fit to be in the White House. But they couldn’t pull the wool over Americans’ eyes as they saw Biden in televised vivid color on multiples of multiples of occasions not knowing what he was saying, wandering around on public stages, and mangling his sentences. On one occasion, he had to be guided at a gathering on the White House lawn by the visiting actor dressed as the Easter Bunny. That would be a serious definition of “unwell.” Only this week, the Democrat Senate leader, New York’s Chuck Schumer, took to the Senate floor to say that a poll from the New York Times was “biased.” He was greeted instantly by disbelieving, raucous laughter from colleagues.  Suffice to say, all of this and more is the behavior of an unwell political party. And it is not hard to believe that it is the party’s reaction to Trump that has caused this sickness.  Let’s face it. The Democrats have a long history as the majority party. They see themselves today as the heirs of the glory days long gone with Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and, more recently, to their mind, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. But in today’s world, they are hardly seen in that fashion. Over at Fox, journalist David Marcus writes this of what he has seen in left-leaning Portland, Oregon:  PORTLAND, Ore. – For more than 100 nights in a row, Antifa thugs have taken over the streets in front of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility (ICE), hooting, hollering and waving any flag that wasn’t Old Glory. As dusk descended on Tuesday, it was clear they — not the hapless handful of police on hand — were in control. I later learned officers were told by their higher-ups not to engage the black-clad, masked radicals. If you have never seen Antifa at night, in their natural menacing environment, I’d describe it as a mental asylum meeting in a Batman movie. It’s almost hard to imagine these characters are real. But alas, these leftists are real. And in this corner, I would suggest they are a symbol of a political party that is decidedly unwell. While there’s no question the Democrats’ Trump-supporting and conservative opponents are taking considerable satisfaction seasoned with some not inconsiderable glee watching all this, for America’s sake there is nothing funny in the least when one of its two major political parties goes off the rails. In fact, going so far off the rails that one wonders if they will ever get their train back on the tracks. Has this kind of “party unwell” illness been seen before? Yes. For those with a long memory, the hard left turn of 1972 Democrats that resulted in a GOP/Nixon 49-state landslide caused Democrats to, as it were, right themselves with a turn four years later to a supposed centrist Jimmy Carter. Can that return to normalcy for Democrats be repeated?  One suspects, on seeing the rising leaders appearing on the scene — the AOCs and Jasmine Crocketts of the party — that this is a party that is unwell at its grassroots level. A party that, in fact, doesn’t even realize it is unwell. And thinking that it is President Trump who is “unwell” and “unhinged” — and not themselves? That is a problem indeed. A big one. Stay tuned. READ MORE: Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Exposes the Depth of America’s Moral Crisis On the Frontlines of the War That Will Change Europe The Ideologies of Western Suicide

by John W. Whitehead, Rutherford Institute: “The era of the Department of Defense is over… From this moment forward, the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting… We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country… You kill people and break things […]

from TheSaltyCracker: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/