Monday, March 24, 2025
Ha ha ha, the budget framework House Republicans were so proud of passing in late February will have to be completely reworked in the Republican Senate, reconciliation bill won't move until the end of July
... “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. ...
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said last month that the House-passed budget needed “a major overhaul” before it could pass the Senate. ...
More.
The major areas of disagreement include switching to the so-called current policy baseline to get the cost of the package to zero, a complete fantasy; choosing which tax cuts, most of which are ad hoc and targeted and not broad-based, to include in the package; cutting future deficits by $880 billion as the House says it wants without cutting Medicaid funding; and goosing defense spending by $175 billion.
Just minor details like that.
Stupid Republicans who work for the IRS in Ogden, Utah voted for their own firings
Republican politicians face mounting anger over Doge cuts
... In a county Donald Trump won by more than 20 percentage points last November, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) seemed to be “actively working to destroy our lives and the livelihood of our local economy”, said IRS employee Torrie, whose mother and grandmother also worked at the agency, and who asked for her full name not to be published for fear of reprisals. ...
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Republicans under Trump lay the groundwork for the police state which Democrats could only wish for: AG Pam Bondi threatens US House Representative Crockett (TX-30) with terrorism charge
In the future, everything wrong will be deemed "domestic terror" and suffer the draconian punishments for domestic terror.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has nothing better to do than appear everyday on Fox News, has the temerity to threaten a Congresswoman. Wait until it's your free speech which is threatened.
On second thought, don't wait. It already is.
... “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!
A new party of violence in the making?
"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."
Clueless Ed Kilgore today post-mid-March thinks angry Democrats are in the minority based on a Gallup poll from late January
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.
Methinks 'twas lefty Elon who did the turning
But of course the turncoat liberal poofter would miss that.
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Travel advice for America's 12.8 million green card holders from immigration lawyers
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.” ...
Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek is a lying sack of shit typical of the Trump administration who should be fired immediately
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.
Friday, March 21, 2025
This greaseball billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks missing a Social Security check, something that never happens, would be no big deal
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.
Absolutely stunning: Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatens to shut down Social Security last night, takes it all back this afternoon
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.
Like Trump, Musk arrogantly dismisses limits on executive power and belittles Congress' power of the purse, Congress wallows in servitude to his seizure of power
... 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.
Grassroots revolution in the making: For the first time since the poll began in 2009 congressional Democrats are now underwater with their own voters in approval ratings
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.
The constitutional crisis that many feared from a vengeful, re-empowered Trump is here
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.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander rebukes DOGE for hiding their own identities while scouring Social Security for ours, stops Elon Musk's fishing expedition for immigrants
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. ...
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