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.
