SOMEBODY STOP THIS

 wearing sunglasses inside and following an event where he at times had a hard time speaking coherently, Elon Musk walks off the CPAC stage waving around a chain saw. this is the guy currently running our government. Congrats, America!

Trying to nail down DOGE

 

Heather Cox Richardson 

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February 18, 2025 (Tuesday)

In a court filing last night, the Director of the Office of Administration in the Trump administration, Joshua Fisher, clarified the government position of billionaire Elon Musk. In a sworn declaration to the court, Fisher identified Musk as “a Senior Advisor to the President.” He explained: “In his role as a Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”

Fisher’s statement went on to say that Musk is neither an employee nor the service administrator—that is, the leader—of the Department of Government Efficiency.

The statement is in response to a lawsuit filed by 14 states—New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—contending that Musk’s role is unconstitutional because he has such sweeping power in his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that the Constitution requires that his position be confirmed by the Senate.

President Trump has routinely referred to Musk as DOGE’s leader, and the media routinely refer to “Elon Musk’s DOGE.” Musk has flooded his social media site with claims that DOGE is cutting programs that he claims are wasteful or fraudulent, although so far he has yet to provide any proof of his extravagant claims. In the early hours of Monday, he reposted a picture of a leaner, meaner version of himself dressed as a Roman gladiator with the caption: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus.” Musk added: “And I am.”

Beginning on Friday, the Trump administration began mass purges of federal government employees. As Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein, and Emily Davies reported in the Washington Post, the firings were haphazard and riddled with errors, but apparently most of those firings were of employees in the probationary period of employment, typically the first year of service but a status that’s triggered by promotions and lateral transfers as well. About 20 FDA employees who review neurological and physical medical devices were fired, hampering the agency’s ability to evaluate the devices produced by Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink. Employment lawyers say the mass firings are illegal because they ignore employee protections.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, had noted: "This is essentially a private citizen directing an organization that's not a federal agency that has access to the entire workings of the federal government to hire, fire, slash contracts, terminate programs, all without any congressional oversight." Now the Trump administration is attempting to protect Musk by saying he is simply an advisor.

Department of Justice lawyer Joshua Gardner told Chutkan that he could not independently confirm the firings of thousands of federal employees last week, prompting her to note that his ignorance seemed willful: "The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small thing,” she said. “You haven't been able to learn if that's true?"

Peter Charalambous of ABC News noted that lawyers from the Department of Justice are also unable to explain what, exactly, DOGE is. They won’t say it’s an “agency,” which, as U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote, would be “subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.” On Friday, Charalambous points out, when reporters asked senior advisor to the Treasury Department’s general counsel Christopher Healy, who runs DOGE, he answered: “I don’t know the answer to that.”

What is clear, though, is that the DOGE team is vacuuming up data from government agencies. It began its run shortly after Trump took office by accessing the Treasury Department payment system, prompting the resignation of career civil servant David Lebryk. Then on February 2 the DOGE people moved on to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) where they struggled with security officers trying to stop them from accessing classified information. By February 12 they were at the General Services Agency, which oversees the government’s real estate.

That pattern has continued. Over the weekend, Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press reported that DOGE was trying to get access to taxpayer data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), specifically the Integrated Data Retrieval System that enables examinations of tax returns, deep troves of information about hundreds of millions of American citizens and businesses. Access to individuals’ bank account numbers and private information has, in the past, been tightly guarded. Indeed, compromising access to that information is a felony.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Committee on Finance, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the top Democrat on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, wrote to Douglas O’Donnell, acting commissioner of the IRS, demanding information about DOGE’s access to taxpayer information and noting that the request for access raises “serious concerns that Elon Musk and his associates are seeking to weaponize government databases containing private bank records and other confidential information to target American citizens and businesses as part of a political agenda.”

DOGE worked over the weekend to get access to Social Security Administration databases as well. Amanda Becker of The 19th notes that these records contain information about individuals’ income, addresses, children, retirement benefits, and even medical records. Lisa Rein, Holly Bailey, Jeff Stein, and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported that acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration Michelle King, who had been with the agency for decades before Trump elevated her to acting commissioner last month, resigned after a clash over access to the data.

Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported today that workers at the General Services Administration resigned in protest after Musk ally Thomas Shedd, who now runs the group of coders DOGE has embedded in that agency, requested access to “all components of the Notify[DOT]gov system.” That system is used to send mass text messages to the public. Information about it is highly sensitive and gives anyone with access “unilateral, private access to the personal data of members of the public,” according to Koebler. That includes not just names and phone numbers, but information about, for example, whether individuals are enrolled in public benefit programs that are based on financial status.

A White House spokesperson defended DOGE’s access to the IRS by saying that “waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” adding: “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.” But DOGE has been unable to document what it claims are cost-saving measures. On Monday it listed what it said were $16 billion in canceled contracts, but Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Ethan Singer of the New York Times corrected the record, noting that a contract DOGE valued at $8 billion was actually closer to $8 million. Further, they noted, claims of $55 billion in savings lacked documentation.

Musk’s recent claims that the Social Security Administration is sending out payments to tens of millions of dead people more than 100 years old—a claim echoed by President Trump—were wrong: the software system defaults missing birthdates to more than 150 years ago and the Social Security Administration decided not to spend more than $9 million on upgrading its system to include death information. Right-wing podcaster Trish Regan warned DOGE that “it’s critical to present the math CORRECTLY” and noted: “Looks like the team got out over its skis on this one.”

Aside from the many legal problems with the argument that the opaque DOGE can alter programs established by Congress, and the problems with documenting its actual work, it is undeniable that Musk’s team has had access to a treasure trove of information about Americans and American businesses and the ways in which they interact with the government. This information can feed the AI projects that Musk envisions putting at the center of American life. It also opens the way for Musk and his cronies to weaponize private information against business competitors as well as political enemies.

In addition, it can also feed a larger technological project for controlling politics.

The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan of ProPublica reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election.

Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for commonsense gun safety legislation, the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gun makers and retailers to collect data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and “whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”

Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that created a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation website. When Trump won in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, “thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”

Don't Let History Reoccur

 

Update of Status of Judge Chutkan's Ruling

 Representative Jasmine Crockett giving an update on the suit against Elon Musk

The Rapid Response team is here to break down what Judge Chutkan’s Ruling meant.  (link here: https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/elon-musk-doge-temporary-restraining-order-appointments-rcna192766)… while also learning that according to Trump… ELON is just a lap dog with no power 🤯. 

I need the names of the people doing the firings and shutting the money off, then…

Perfect Synopsis of Where We Are

 

Elon is All Bluster, All Lies

 All Bluster, All lies. From Wired article: Musk, during the Oval Office press conference which was attended by his son, claimed the payments to 150-year-olds was part of the billions, maybe even tens of billions, in corruption and waste that his DOGE effort had already uncovered.

But just like condom shipments to Gaza or payments to Politico, Musk’s claims of Social Security fraud seems to be a gross misrepresentation of what’s actually happening and why.

In the same press conference where he made the remarks about 150-year-olds collecting Social Security benefits, Musk said his DOGE project would be “maximally transparent” with all savings being made posted to its website.

But when the site came online last week, not only was it just a repurposed Twitter feed with terrible security, it also lacked any details in a section dedicated to savings.

At the time, the site’s administrators claimed the savings section would be updated no later than Valentine’s Day. When that deadline came and went without any update, the administrator wrote: “Receipts coming over the weekend!” The page was briefly populated on Saturday before being taken down; at the time of publication on Monday, no receipts were posted.

“I do worry about bait-and-switch and further transfers of wealth and even more debt financing into the hands of even fewer, driven and riven by power and abject self-interest, not public interest,” Drake believes. “Democracy is in real danger.”

Neither DOGE nor the White House responded to requests for comment about Musk’s claims.

SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-150-year-old-benefits/?_sp=f4f4ab8c-cb24-4630-b8a7-6e58dae6ee87.1739984149434

No one elected Elon Musk and his tech bro wannabe Stormtroopers

Monday Smile

 

Pete Has Fallen

 

HERE'S THE DISGUSTING VIDEO

CANADA's PISSED OFF

 

THIS IS WHAT THAT PIECE OF SHIT WHO RIGGED THE ELECTION IS DOING TO AMERICAN REPUTATION WORLD WIDE

Elon Musk falls on his face with HUMILIATING self-own

Who thinks Musk is a "genius"?

The Daily Kos recently published a story about one of Musk supposed  "wunkerkind" Luke Farritor. 

This child may be smart in some instances, but he's a stupid 23 year old with no real life experiences, dumb enough to say "okay" to Leon. 

(I know, I spelled it "wrong")


 Check out this link:  

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/7/2302083/--This-is-a-bad-idea-Meet-Luke-Farritor-a-23-year-old-SpaceX-intern-accessing-US-nuclear-info

Weasel-Haired Cocksplat

 

Power To The People

 

I Love Zelensky

 

Zelensky: Trump told me Putin wants to end the war. I told him Putin is a liar.

AT LAST

 After almost a month, I am cautiously letting out a breath of relief. 

I know this will be a long hard fight, but AT LEAST SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING ABOUT ELON MUSK

  
Here is the link to the press conference with NY AG Leticia James  and Connetitcut Attorney General William Tong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0tuMqRWdOw

James is leading a multistate coalition to stop Elon Musk from accessing American’s personal data at the Treasury Department.

Fuck that GULF OF AMERICA bullshit

 

SHARE WIDELY AND DO THIS EVERY DAY.  #FuckTrump

Monday Smile

 

SIBLINGS 

Honore on Musk

BREAKING: Renowned former U.S. Army Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré sounds the alarm about the "national security risk" posed by MAGA billionaire Elon Musk — and he didn't hold back.

America can not afford to ignore this... "Mr. Musk’s business ventures are heavily reliant on China. He borrowed at least $1.4 billion from banks controlled by the Chinese government to help build Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory, which was responsible for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries in the third quarter of 2024," the general writes in an Op-Ed for The New York Times.

 "China does not tend to give things away," he adds. "The country’s laws stipulate that the Communist Party can demand intelligence from any company doing business in China, in exchange for participating in the country’s markets."

 According to Honoré, this means that China could demand that Musk hand over sensitive materials due to his close proximity to the Trump administration, using his businesses as leverage.

"The last thing the United States needs is for China to potentially have an easier way of obtaining classified intelligence and national security information," writes the general"

 "The question now is whether the incoming Trump administration will take this risk seriously," Honoré adds. "The fact that Mr. Musk spent a quarter of a billion dollars to help re-elect Mr. Trump does not give the incoming White House the license to look the other way at the national security risks he may pose," he writes. "If Mr. Trump and his appointees mean what they say about getting tough on America’s adversaries, then they will act on this matter without delay. There is too much at stake to ignore what’s right in front of them," concludes Honoré. He is absolutely right. Musk's dream of being a corrupt oligarch who rules over America cannot be allowed to endanger us all. He must be investigated immediately.

Bless Scotland