The Atlantic publishes full Signal thread with Hegseth, Waltz after Trump says texts not classified
... Goldberg in Wednesday’s report wrote: “If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds.”
“The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic,” he wrote. ...
Whether liberals will address this head on, however, remains to be seen. They may simply challenge the meddling of the executive in a matter the constitution reserves to the states.
The Supreme Court has consistently deferred on this to the states, even during all the election controversy of 2020, rebuffing Trump over and over again, and is likely to do so again, which would be yet another defeat for Trump.
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
-- Article I, Section 4, clause 1
Trump promises more EOs on elections in the future.
He's already issued 100 of them. And the next guy can issue 100 overturning them.
This is all theatre. Republicans' narrow majorities in the House and Senate make any of these becoming permanent law extremely unlikely.
Trump signs order seeking to overhaul US elections, including requiring proof of citizenship
More here.
... Despite generating $79 billion in revenue in 2023, the USPS lost $6.5 billion. ...
... The agency said in a report that the country's fiscal health deteriorated further since Moody's lowered its outlook on the U.S. triple-A rating in November 2023. ...
Moody's is the last among major ratings agencies to keep a top, triple-A rating for U.S. sovereign debt, though it lowered its outlook in late 2023 due to wider fiscal deficits and higher interest debt payments.
Fitch cut the U.S. sovereign rating by one notch to AA+ from AAA in 2023, citing fiscal deterioration and repeated down-the-wire debt ceiling negotiations that threaten the government’s ability to pay its bills. It was the second major rating agency to strip the United States of its top triple-A rating, after Standard & Poor's did so after the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. ...
More.
... "We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things." ...
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said eliminating a district court would create "massive, massive backlogs". ...
Reported here.
The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days
this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from
logging in to their online accounts because the servers were overloaded. ...
The turmoil is leaving many retirees, disabled claimants and legal immigrants who need Social Security cards with less access or shut out of the system altogether, according to those familiar with the problems. ...
Leland Dudek — the accidental leader elevated to acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs — has issued rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for front-line staff. Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems. Others have left in disgust. ...
Alarmed lawmakers are straining to answer questions from angry constituents in their districts. Calls have flooded into congressional offices. The AARP announced on Monday that more than 2,000 retirees per week have called the organization since early February — double the usual number — with concerns about whether benefits they paid for during their working careers will continue. Social Security is the primary source of income for about 40 percent of older Americans.
Trump has said
repeatedly that the administration “won’t touch” Social Security, a
promise that aides say applies to benefit levels that can only be
adjusted by Congress. But in just six weeks, the cuts to staffing and
offices have already taken a toll on access to benefits, officials and
advocates say. ...
More.
This should be good for election turnout in November 2026.
Goldberg, who has the same initials as U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, was mistakenly added to the group by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz.
Reported here.
I hope they don't bomb Ireland when they intend to bomb Iran.
In the chats, the user identified as Vice President JD Vance expresses concerns about the strikes but ultimately agrees to go along with US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth's plan - before adding 'I just hate bailing Europe out again.'
Hegseth responds: 'I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It's PATHETIC.'
And of course they want to throw Mike Waltz under the bus:
There are claims that Mr Waltz is facing the sack over the saga - as he's believed to have been the official who 'added the editor-in-chief [of The Atlantic] to the group'.
One source told Politico: 'Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a f***ing idiot.'
The Financial Times reports that privately some German officials are starting to wonder out loud whether the time has come to acquire their own nuclear arsenal.
Or is the Republican advantage there so great that Randy Fine doesn't need the money to win?
The Ides of March will get you every time.
... “Thune and others have said they don’t think it’s realistic we’ll move the finished product until the end of July,” a Republican senator said of Thune’s projected timeline for moving Trump’s agenda.
“Thune said he thought that the House’s timeline on this was totally unrealistic and that the House doesn’t have their ducks in a row, and their budget resolution has to be completely reworked, and this idea that we do it by April or May is just ridiculous,” the source said. ...
Republican politicians face mounting anger over Doge cuts
... “She is an elected public official, so she needs to tread very carefully because nothing will happen to Elon Musk, and we’re going to fight to protect all of the Tesla owners throughout this country,” Bondi said during an appearance on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” ...
If AG Merrick Garland had done this to a Republican, you would have never heard the end of it from the likes of Mark Levin and his ilk.
But hey, when Republicans do it it's OK!
"They hate us": Democrats confront their own Tea Party
Various observations after Democrat town halls:
"Among the things I got [at a town hall] were: 'Will you call for Chuck Schumer to resign?'" the lawmaker said. "Last week I got: 'You need to tell your leadership they had no right rebuking Democrats for being strong at'" Trump's speech to a joint session of Congress.
"Another thing I got was: 'Democrats are too nice. Nice and civility doesn't work. Are you prepared for violence?'"
"The level of exasperation is comparable [to the Tea Party] for sure, even if the issues and policies are very different," said [Jared] Huffman [CA-2].
"The base has been pissed off for a while." ... it "seems to be more widespread" now.
"My constituents have passionately said they are not happy with Democratic leadership. ... They expect more from me and from Democrats in Congress."
"If near unanimity against the Republican CR is not definitive evidence of a party unified in opposition to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, then I am not sure what would be," said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.).
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) told Axios that "no one expressed displeasure with Democrats" during his last two-hour town hall. People are "back to focusing on Musk and Trump," he said.
"All I know is that most folks are pissed, and scared,
and they hate this chaos and the blatant corruption of Trump and Musk,"
said Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio). "Democrats absolutely want leaders who are going to fight back and fix what's broken."
But this simply ignores everything Trump has flooded the zone with since January 27. That's a backward-looking poll.
Trump's has been a non-stop roll out of actions designed to alienate everyone in every arena.
Republicans are angry, too.
Has Ed been living under a rock?
Ed Kilgore here in "Today’s Angry Democrats Are Not Tomorrow’s Tea Party of the Left":
... it’s not accurate to say that the current wave of anger is ideological or the product of an aroused Left. As Politico notes, Democrats unhappy with their party are not at all united in any ideological diagnosis or prescription:
Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.
I think it's way too early to say this is or is not like the Tea Party period. It was 21 months from Santelli's Rant to Election 2010, so it's still very early innings, the beginning of the game. We're not even two months in.
The energy I've seen in the interim directed against office holders does resemble the Tea Party movement in some ways, which was a maelstrom of angst for its time, sucking rich and poor and everyone in between into its vortex. Its energy reverberated long after into the November 2010 election and later into the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The violence against Tesla does not resemble the Tea Party. But it is energy. And it is ideological. Elon Musk is a traitor to the green energy movement, making the prospect of climate doom more probable to them. The left is most definitely aroused.
I can still remember my congressman warning me that unless he voted for TARP in September 2008 my credit card might stop working. Politicians like him then weren't focused on ordinary people and their views, same as today at Republican town halls where one tone-deaf politician after another is greeted with derision by people upset about losing their government jobs and in fear of losing benefits they've earned.
The Tesla protesters think climate doom is near, just as the craziest factions of the Tea Party movement were sure another Great Depression was just around the corner.
No, the politicians in 2008 were focused on the big money failures of investment banking like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, which were outside the FDIC system, not on the people whose traditional banks and jobs were in actual peril.
Civilian employment fell by 3.5 million just from December 2008 to March 2009. 24 banks failed during this period alone, after 22 failures already in 2008 up to that point.
And what the politicians did subsequently fixed nothing.
461 more FDIC banks went on to fail by the end of 2014. Civilian employment crashed by 10.05 million from July 2008 to January 2010, and did not recover its July 2007 level until October of 2014. Between 2006 and 2014 there were approximately 9.3 million real estate foreclosure filings or the equivalent.
Millions were badly hurt. Many never recovered. They and their children voted for Trump in 2016.
People getting hurt is the standard of comparison in these things.
Putting 600,000 government workers out of a job all of a sudden in 2025 is really bad, stupid, and downright mean, but not on the same level as the Great Financial Crisis. But start missing Social Security checks or disappearing your neighbor in the middle of the night because something was wrong on his immigration paperwork and things might get spicy. A shooting war with Canadians or Mexicans, or Panamanians or Danes, would be next level.
American tourists or workers or residents abroad incarcerated in a tit-for-tat with the Trump administration might start to focus even more minds.
Who knows what's next?
Like I said, early innings, the energy is building, but Kilgore isn't here.
But of course the turncoat liberal poofter would miss that.
Seen here:
... McBean Pompy says she advises green card holders not to stay outside the US longer than six months. If they do, she says, it’s possible for the US government “to allege that they have abandoned their residency.” Also, green card holders who are in removal proceedings shouldn’t travel, she says. And she advises clients not to sign any documents at the airport, especially if they don’t understand them.
Leopold says the advice he’s giving to clients varies depending on their circumstances. He’s advised many visa holders to hold off on travel, particularly given the possibility that new travel bans are coming soon from the Trump administration.
“If I were not a citizen, I would think long and hard before I traveled. And that includes green card holders. It’s less of a risk, obviously, for a green card holder to travel, because you do have more rights with the green card, and it’s much harder to keep a green card holder out of the country,” he says. “But anybody who’s got blemishes on their record, a conviction, even misdemeanor convictions, they should not travel unless they’ve talked to counsel.” ...
Dudek's reasoning below is the same level of ridiculous we saw when Trump said he wouldn't recall the deportation flights ordered by Judge Boasberg because they were already in international airspace and were therefore not subject to the order. Trump ordered the flights in the dead of a Friday night/Saturday morning a week ago to avoid detection and court intervention.
Republicans playing chicken with the lifeline for over 73 million Americans wasn't what people voted for last November, but that's what they are getting.
... Dudek said the court order [from Judge Hollander] is so broad that it could apply to any Social Security employee, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” Dudek told Bloomberg. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.”
However, in a March 18 letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Dudek said there are only 11 DOGE-affiliated individuals at the Social Security Administration. ...
Dudek assumed the role of acting commissioner in February when then acting commissioner Michelle King stepped down due to DOGE privacy concerns. ...
Reported here.
Howard is otherwise busy firing people and disbanding volunteer industry groups who help the government create important statistics and guidance about things like gross domestic product, population, trade, etc. which people rely on every month to forecast the economy.
What a shit show. This guy needs to be fired stat.
This is America under Mad King Ludwig.
Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatened Thursday evening to bar Social Security Administration employees from accessing its computer systems in response to a judge’s order blocking the U.S. DOGE Service from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.
Less than 24 hours
later — after the judge rejected his argument and the White House
intervened — Dudek is saying he was “out of line.”...
“[The White House] called me and let me know it’s important to reaffirm to the public that we’re open for business,” he said. “The White House did remind me that I was out of line and so did the judge. And I appreciate that.”...
Dudek first made his threat to close down the agency during a Bloomberg News interview Thursday night. ...
Such a dramatic move to effectively shut down the agency would have been unprecedented in the agency’s history and would immediately begin halting benefit payments for millions of Americans.
“For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck — but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink,” Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. “Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has proven again that he is in way over his head, compromising the privacy of millions of Americans, shutting down services that senior citizens rely on and planning debilitating layoffs, all in service to Elon Musk’s lies.”
More.
... Asked later that day whether Congress should weigh in on his widespread cuts, Musk responded, “Well, they do have a vote.” ... the administration has privately reassured GOP lawmakers, particularly House Republicans, that DOGE will continue to unilaterally rescind congressionally approved funding whether lawmakers are given the chance to weigh in or not. ...
Here.
Democratic voters are even angrier than you think. ... Democrats are on the verge of a Tea Party-style, intra-party revolt. ... these numbers open the door to a potentially bruising string of primaries in both the House and Senate. There are 13 Democratic-held Senate seats up for reelection next year — many of them involving veteran senators in the bluest states — raising the prospect of a stream of younger, insurgent candidates more closely aligned with the party base, similar to what the GOP has contended with over the past 15 years. ...
More.
Congress is cowed; that’s one supposedly coequal branch of government
down. But federal courts are proving more resistant to Donald Trump’s
trampling of laws and the Constitution. Now, just two months in office,
the president has all but crossed the red line — defying a judge’s order
— that for more than two centuries has separated the rule of law in
this country from its undoing. ...
The chief justice of the United States, John G. Roberts Jr., schooled
both the congressman and the president, issuing a rare statement of
what should be obvious: “Impeachment is not an appropriate response to
disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
But Trump won’t be educated. ...
In effect, and denials aside, Trump and his lieutenants defied the law ...
Jackie Calmes for The Los Angeles Times, here.
A federal judge Thursday issued a temporary restraining order barring Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team from having access to personally identifiable information from the Social Security Administration.
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in a scathing ruling accused DOGE
of launching a “fishing expedition” at the Social Security agency and
failing to provide any reason why it needed to access vast swaths of
Americans’ personal and private data. ...
The judge also ordered the DOGE team members and affiliates to delete all non-anonymized personally identifiable information in their possession or control that they have accessed “directly or indirectly” since Jan. 20. ...
Hollander, noting the affiliates of DOGE have kept their identities hidden, wrote, “ironically, the identity of these DOGE affiliates has been concealed because defendants are concerned that the disclosure of even their names would expose them to harassment and thus invade their privacy.”
“The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent,” the judge wrote. ...
... Earlier this month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia University apartment building, took him to New Jersey and quickly transferred him to Jena, more than 1,000 miles away from his pregnant wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and his attorneys in New York.
Civil rights lawyers who work with immigrants locked up in Louisiana’s detention centers say they are concerned for Khalil, given the Jena facility’s unsettling history. However, they say they are not surprised that ICE transferred Khalil to Louisiana, where access to counsel is extremely limited, and where the courts skew conservative.
In a phone interview with Verite News last week, Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at civil rights nonprofit RFK Human Rights, said the Trump Administration is “forum shopping” Khalil’s deportation case — looking for the jurisdiction that will give the government the outcome it wants.
“The government has the ability to do that with immigration,” Enriquez said. “It can arrest someone in a jurisdiction where the case law is very favorable to the person arrested, and then sweep them away to another jurisdiction.” ...
... “I have rules for men,” Watters began on Wednesday’s [Fox News] The Five. “They’re just funny, they’re not that serious. Like, you don't eat soup in public. You don't cross your legs. And you don't drink from a straw. And one of the reasons you don’t drink from a straw is the way your lips purse. It’s very effeminate.”
Referring to Walz, he said: “His excuse was, ‘well I was drinking a milkshake.’ Again, you shouldn’t be drinking a milkshake. Milkshakes are for kids.”
Watters also claimed that real men “don’t wave simultaneously with two hands.”
“We wave with one hand, not both hands at the same time,” he said. ...
More.
As the Social Security Administration seeks to curb identity fraud, more people will now be required to visit an office to prove their identity for new benefit claims and direct deposit changes. ... The changes are aimed at helping to avoid the fraudulent redirection of benefit checks, which the agency has been warning about for years. ... SSA estimates the agency is now losing more than $100 million per year due to direct deposit fraud. ... The change may require foot traffic to Social Security offices nationwide to increase by about 75,000 to 85,000 more in-person visitors per week, according to reports on an internal Social Security Administration memo. ... The AARP, an interest group that represents Americans ages 50 and over, urged the Social Security Administration to reverse the decision.
In fiscal 2024 Social Security paid out $1.35 trillion in benefits. $100 million is 0.0074% of that!
I predict that the costs of this silliness will exceed the savings.
Hill Republicans already hated the ‘idiotic’ call to impeach judges. Then Trump jumped in.
... Impeachment proceedings, even when they don’t involve presidents, can be time- and resource-intensive affairs. ... privately there is dread inside Johnson’s leadership circle about the prospect of having to pursue messy, certain-to-fail impeachments that could ultimately backfire on the GOP’s razor-thin majority.
“It’s never going to happen,” said a senior House Republican aide. “There aren’t the votes.”
“It would be such a heavy lift and we’ve got too many heavy lifts coming up,” said another top GOP aide. “What is the endgame here?”
A third said GOP leaders and even some conservative House members are “rolling their eyes” at the impeachment filings that “aren’t going to go anywhere.” ...
Bullion surged to an all-time high of $3,045.24 earlier in the session, marking its 15th record peak this year.
More.
Violent attacks on Tesla dealerships spike as Musk takes prominent role in Trump White House
... Musk critics have organized dozens of peaceful demonstrations at Tesla dealerships and factories across North America and Europe. Some Tesla owners, including a U.S. senator who feuded with Musk, have vowed to sell their vehicles.
But the attacks are keeping law enforcement busy. ...
A number of the most prominent incidents have been reported in left-leaning cities in the Pacific Northwest, like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, where anti-Trump and anti-Musk sentiment runs high. ...
The indispensable contribution driving investment back home to the United States will have to be penalizing foreign investment's income and rewarding long term domestic investment's income through the tax code, which also means dramatically raising ordinary income tax rates. In other words, returning to the status quo ante-Reagan.
The reason is we have learned that rich people don't know what's best to do with their own money any more than the rest of us do. The rich have not done what's best for the country. Ronald Reagan was completely wrong about that. They took one look at the quick and easy money and immediately started looking to maximize it elsewhere. The tax code used to force them to do the right thing, which was keep it here and invest at home if they wanted to get richer. And that is what made all of us richer, with jobs with which we could afford to marry, buy houses and cars, raise children and send them to college.
People who got rich through Reagan's low ordinary income tax rates fell for the cheap labor abroad to get even richer, but now here they and we sit together beholden to countries abroad who are hostile toward us.
The chart below shows how domestic investment dominated foreign throughout the post-war until the Reagan tax reform of 1986. Investment abroad did not overtake domestic until 1993, at 105% of private fixed investment, after the Reagan tax cuts had taken full effect. Foreign as a percentage of domestic investment is double that and more today. For every four dollars invested at home in 2024, eight were invested abroad.
It took decades to screw this up, and it will take decades to fix it. But as sure as I'm sitting here neither J. D. Vance nor Donald Trump nor any other politician out there has any clue about this.
The ruling is significant because the dopes in the Republican Party just rammed through a continuing spending resolution which fully funds the now severely diminished USAID.
The money must be spent as allocated by Congress.
Judge rules DOGE’s USAID dismantling likely violates the Constitution
WASHINGTON (AP) — The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development by billionaire Elon Musk’s
Department of Government Efficiency likely violated the Constitution, a
federal judge ruled Tuesday as he indefinitely blocked DOGE from making
further cuts to the agency. ...
In one of the first DOGE lawsuits against Musk himself, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland rejected the Trump administration’s position that Musk is merely President Donald Trump’s adviser.
Musk’s public statements and social media posts demonstrate that he has “firm control over DOGE,” the judge found pointing to an online post where Musk said he had “fed USAID into the wood chipper.” ...
The judge said it’s likely that USAID is no longer capable of performing some of its statutorily required functions. ...
Chuang said DOGE’s and Musk’s fast-moving destruction of USAID likely harmed the public interest by depriving elected lawmakers of their “constitutional authority to decide whether, when and how to close down an agency created by Congress.” ...
The official White House spokesperson is conceding that the lands taken in Russia's invasion of Ukraine are Russia.
This is a lie, a big lie, an utter disgrace.
Ordinarily after successfully pulling off such a deportation coup, which may or may not be legal, you would think Trump would be gloating, but you would be wrong.
Nothing is ever good enough. He is never satisfied. He is never secure.
The 3.257 trillion miles of 2019 was exceeded in 2024 by 5 billion miles, on an average annual basis.
The depression in road travel from the Great Financial Crisis lasted eight years, from 2007 to 2015.
Previous to that we had similar, but smaller contractions in US road travel, from 1979 to 1982, three years, and from 1973 to 1975, two years, precipitated by the oil trade shocks of the Iranian Revolution and the Yom Kippur War respectively.
You are now free to move about the country.
May 22, 2024:
Average age of vehicles hits new record in 2024
... The US vehicle fleet surged to 286 million vehicles in operation (VIO) in January ...
... 3.2 million EVs in operation in January ...
Here.
This is the 10th of 19 estimates scheduled through the end of April for 1Q.
This is the 4th negative estimate.
In the first column are 30 Democrats who infamously voted to abolish the filibuster late in the evening on Jan 19, 2022, which failed 48-52 because of Sinema and Manchin, but happily tried to mount one last week.
The roll call vote in the US Senate is here (the Wikipedia entry is wrong on this, citing a CBS story and dating the vote to Jan 20).
In column two are 7 Democrats who campaigned to abolish the filibuster but who also happily tried to mount one last week.
The 2017 letter
to Mitch McConnell in the last column references the names of 19 Democrats
who then said they were for the filibuster, but last week 5 of them weren't lol.
The irony of all this of course is that Joe Biden's spending for fiscal 2025 was just passed with little modification by Republicans with the help of 10 Democrats (1 Independent) and the Democrats are beating themselves up over it.
But it's kind of hard to crow about Joe Biden's success after you just forced him out of power.
🤷
