The second news story I saw this morning said that the Trump Administration is threatening to shut down Social Security if Elon Musk’s Lost Boys are not allowed access to our personal information. This is from Bloomberg:
The Trump administration is threatening to all but shut down the Social Security Administration in response to a judge’s ruling blocking activities by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — an action that could delay payments to millions of beneficiaries caught in the middle of the legal battle.
Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek said the temporary restraining order issued Thursday is so broad in blocking access to data by “DOGE affiliates” that it could apply to any Social Security employee.
Weirdly, though, the Bloomberg headline makes it sound as if it’s the judge’s ruling that threatens Social Security, not the Trump Administration. The only media source I’ve seen with a headline that flatly states the Trump Administration is threatening Social Security is Rolling Stone. Which reports,
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” said Lee Dudek, acting Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner, arguing the order was too broad, according to Bloomberg News. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems,” he said, adding: “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency.”
Dudek’s threat to block SSA employees from using the agency’s IT systems — a move that could halt Social Security payments — came in response to a judge’s temporary restraining order in a case brought by the AFL-CIO labor union. The order bars Social Security Administration officials from allowing DOGE, including Musk, and the SSA’s DOGE team to access personally identifiable information. It also directs Musk and DOGE to delete from their possession all non-anonymized personal data, and bars them from having access to SSA computers or code.
If he really did shut down Social Security, that would certainly get the nation’s attention. But I don’t think the blowback would be all that helpful to the Trump Administration, or to Republicans in general.
The first news story I saw this morning, from the New York Times, said that Elon Musk is scheduled today to be briefed by the Pentagon on a potential war with China.
The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Another official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.
Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and President Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China. “China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night social media post.
It was not clear if the briefing for Mr. Musk would go ahead as originally planned. But providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.
Trump just denied the Musk/China story. Then a few minutes later the WSJ confirmed it. Any guesses who’s governing the country right now?
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) March 20, 2025 at 11:19 PM
Oopsie. The new story is that the Wrath of Musk will fall on the Pentagon leakers.
Donald Trump’s top adviser Elon Musk has openly threatened Pentagon employees who may have leaked information that the tech billionaire was due to get a briefing on a potential American war with China.
The story, published by the New York Times on Thursday evening U.S. time, said that — according to anonymous American officials — the Pentagon planned to brief Musk on Friday about the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China.
After the story went live, the planned meeting was confirmed by Pentagon officials and President Trump — but both denied that the session would discuss military plans involving China.
Musk doesn’t have any business being briefed by the Pentagon about anything, as far as I’m concerned. And he bleeping does business with bleeping China.
According to Forbes, Musk’s current disapproval rating is at 51 percent, which tells me a lot of voters are still not paying attention. It would be a lot higher, if they were. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported this morning that Musk is telling Tesla employees to hang on to their stock after Tesla shares plunged more than 50 percent in just three months. Musk points out to his employees that Tesla makes “the best-selling car on earth,” the Model Y. And it was the best-selling car on earth in 2023 and probably in 2024, but it’s hard to see it repeating that distinction in 2025.
See also Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue.
And then yesterday the Financial Times reported that Tesla appears to have an accounting problem.
As Tesla’s car sales and share price plummet in response to Elon Musk’s political and physical stances, we would like to draw readers’ attention to something puzzling in the group’s accounts. Compare Tesla’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and $1.4bn appears to have gone astray. The sum is big enough to matter even at Tesla, and comes at a moment when attention is returning to the group’s underlying numbers, now that its fully diluted stock market valuation has crashed from $1.7tn to below $800bn.
The Financial Times is not saying that anything shady is going on, but does call this a “red flag.”
Musk currently is dumping a lot of money into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to fill a seat being opened by a retiring liberal judge with a MAGAt. The election will be held April 1. The candidates are Susan Crawford, known to be liberal, and Musk’s candidate, Brad Schimel. Musk is repeating his 2024 tricks, running deceptive ads and offering $100 to people who will sign a petition to “oppose activist judges.” Petition signers are not being asked to vote for Schimel, but those who sign the petition are giving Musk personal information that will allow his people to contact them again. He did something very similar in Pennsylvania in 2024.
I would think all it would take is to let Wisconsin voters know that Schimel is backed by Elon Musk to have them stampeding to vote for Crawford. But we’ll see. If Crawford does win — and I understand she is still ahead in polls — this might tell us something about whether Musk still has any value to Republicans, or to Trump.
Never have I seen mistrust of government and politicians so high. Never before have I heard so many of them have their opinions face summary rejections by those they are supposed to represent. Personally, I see them more as pawns for Putin or Netanyahu than their own constituents. As for Musk, his character, motives, and behavior radiate an aura of deception and mistrust. It is like watching a ten-year old child operating a massive bulldozer on both a six pack of beer and Red Bull. It is beyond madness.
Agree. I hope you all have read this:
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/26/from-maga-to-monarchy-how-tech-billionaires-are-engineering-american-autocracy/
So, we swap DEI for Opus Dei on hallucinogens and steroids. The second coming of Francisco Franko and the cult of the Catholic Mafia with a techno bent.
From Slate:
Most Americans, if they have heard of the organization Opus Dei, know it because of the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code, a 2003 thriller in which the primary villain is an Opus Dei assassin, an albino monk who kills to protect his cult. But Opus Dei is an actual Catholic group still active today, and while it has no albino monks (actually, no monks at all), its real history contains enough dark deeds—as detailed in a newly published exposé by the British journalist Gareth Gore—that it needs no help from fiction to be fit for outlandish conspiracy theories.
Gore’s book Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, which was published in the U.S. on Oct. 1, contains a shocking number of sinister allegations about the organization, which emerged from fascist Spain through a close alliance with the Franco regime. Gore describes financial crimes, sexual abuse, the grooming and coercion of recruits, the drugging of members, human trafficking, and even slavery.
What a link.
"It is like watching a ten-year old child operating a massive bulldozer on both a six pack of beer and Red Bull"
Not like, is, more accurately it IS a 10-year-old man-child only he's high on fucking ketamine!