The Daily Reid: dips and doges

The doge gang are coming for your grandma's Social Security hotline.

There’s something deeply twisted about doge … this completely unconstitutional man-child army putsch of the federal government. The doge deep state operatives doing the slashing and burning appear to be a cobbled together crew of Elon fanboys, some of them apparently white nationalism curious, six figure hacker types, and apparently at least one wanna be fashion influencer.

From CNN:

As the Office of Personnel Management oversaw the layoffs of thousands of federal workers and pressed others to justify their positions, the agency’s chief spokesperson repeatedly used her office for a side hustle: aspiring Instagram fashion influencer.

In at least a dozen videos filmed in her OPM office, political appointee McLaurine Pinover modeled her outfit choices for the day, while directing followers from her Instagram account to a website that could earn her commissions on clothing sales.

On the same day OPM sent a government-wide memo pressing federal officials to identify barriers they faced in their work to “swiftly terminate poor performing employees,” Pinover posted a video blowing a kiss to the camera with the caption “work look” and the hashtag #dcinfluencer. Her Instagram account linked to a site where viewers could buy the $475 purple skirt she wore in the video.

One watchdog group said her videos could run afoul of rules restricting the use of government property for personal benefit because, while in the workplace, she was using a website that pays content creators commissions from the clothing brands they promote.

Former OPM staffers during the Biden administration also told CNN that they were offended by Pinover posting as a fashion influencer on government property while defending mass layoffs of federal workers – at a time when top Trump administration officials have accused career employees of being lazy and wasteful.

I mean, the clothes aren’t even cute…

And as they stumble, bumble and steamroll their way toward clear cutting the federal budget to make room for permanent, luxurious tax cuts for the super rich, the doge gang came perilously close to enraging an entire Florida full of seniors by messing with the Social Security hotline. They only pulled back when they were busted by, of all people, Jeff Bezos’ beleaguered Washington Post:

The Social Security Administration late Wednesday abandoned plans it was considering to end phone service for millions of Americans filing retirement and disability claims after The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team was weighing the change to root out alleged fraud.

The shift would have directed elderly and disabled people to rely on the internet and in-person field offices to process their claims, curtailing a service that 73 million Americans have relied on for decades to access earned government benefits.

However, Social Security and White House officials said the administration will still move ahead with another far more limited element of the original proposal: Customers will no longer be able to change a direct deposit routing number or other bank information by phone.

“Approximately 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information,” the agency’s press office said in a statement hours after The Post published its article. The “current protocol of simply asking identifying questions by telephone is no longer enough to prevent fraud.”

Ok but who is gonna prevent the fraud that is Elon Musk, America’s biggest welfare queen, who apparently sold his favorite employee, Donald Trump, a $90,000 Tesla with more than three dozen recall notices on it…

This is the only image of Elon Musk I will use when referring to him in stories. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Oh and Elon apparently is the one who wants a government shutdown…

As President Donald Trump has been trying to keep House Republicans in line over a continuing resolution to keep the government open through the fall, Elon Musk has expressed a desire for a government shutdown, four sources familiar with his position tell WIRED.

Sources also tell WIRED that Musk has wanted a government shutdown—an aim that runs contrary to the White House’s stated desire to avoid one—in part because it would potentially make it easier to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, essentially achieving a permanent shutdown. The sources, whom WIRED has granted anonymity, specifically asked to be described generically because information about Musk’s support for a shutdown is closely held.

“A shutdown has been his preference,” says one Republican familiar with the situation, referring to Musk. “I think he’s boxed in there by the president. I think it would be really hard for him to get around that.”

A second Republican who had heard about Musk’s desire for a government shutdown tells WIRED that the billionaire’s goal is for the continuing resolution—a spending bill to temporarily fund the government—to tank, if only to achieve a brief government shutdown.

“You know none of this is about saving money, right?” says a third Republican familiar with the behind-the-scenes push from Musk. “It’s all about destroying a liberal power base.”

Musk and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Huh… so if and when the government shuts down, it will be Elon Musk getting exactly what he wants. Noted. #ElonMuskShutdown.

Meahwhile, skittish Republicans are considering deploying an accounting trick that will allow them to present the absolute lie that their precious tax cuts cost … wait for it … nothing at all…

It’s the accounting maneuver that could break the Senate, upend the federal budget process and explode the national debt.

That’s according to critics of a fiscal tactic that congressional Republicans are now seriously considering as they struggle to figure out how to deliver on all of President Donald Trump’s policy demands.

Adopting the “current policy baseline,” as it’s called, could be the only way for the GOP to make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent and avoid painful cuts to federal programs, as well as pile on new income tax exemptions for tips, overtime and Social Security. Trump is expected to discuss the move with members of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee at a White House meeting Thursday.

If lawmakers adopt the change, it would essentially make it appear as though extending current tax rates, set to expire at the end of the year, would cost nothing rather than the roughly $4 trillion over 10 years that nonpartisan scorekeepers estimate.

But while some Republicans argue that continuing current tax rates shouldn’t be counted toward the deficit, critics of the maneuver — including prominent GOP budget experts — say that it would be a recipe for disaster, a fiscal Pandora’s box that once opened could be used to forever excuse huge ongoing deficits.

“I would caution my friends, my Republican friends and senators up there, be careful about this,” said Bill Hoagland, the former GOP staff director for the Senate Budget Committee. “Someday you may be in the minority.”

Sure, assuming we still have free and fair elections…

Ever wonder

…what people who actually know Elon Musk think of him and his glitchy cars? Cue Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who had his account on X-Twitter banned for some reason I can’t put my finger on….

Stop the Steal

I want you to note how Musk is starting to treat American communities … particularly Black communities … like his people historically, and AI companies in general in the modern era tend to treat African nations and people, including environmental and human exploitation. This story courtesy of The Tennessee Holler and Memphis Community Against Pollution:

Watch this space. There is a reason these companies, including Musk’s XAI, and other companies like Open AI and Bezos’ companies are pushing their way into mainly southern, impoverished red states, where taxes are low and environmental and business regulation barely exists. We are in a race to the bottom where the billionaire class are seeking to create an American third world, where they can exploit labor, despoil the environment and amass unlimited wealth, effectively tax free.

To to that, they need access to massive amounts of data, access to enormous energy resources (AI is resource-thirsty) … a large pool of unemployed, desperate workers — maybe some with solid skills who have lost their government jobs??? — and cheap, exploitable land and resources to power their AI machines.

So ask yourself: why doesn’t Tesla pay any taxes??? And why is doge trying to rifle through our tax records??? Why do they seem so eager to suck up so much data on 320 million Americans? And why are they so eager to demolish our representative democracy and replace it with a weird, right wing religious, DEI-phobic, white nationalist kakistocratic, oligarcic technocracy? I think you can put two and two together.

So perhaps it’s time to start treating Elon the way we did his growing up country: apartheid era South Africa: boycott and divestment. It’s already starting… while an international movement to boycott U.S. goods is growing, too. And no, Donald, it’s not illegal. Grow up. If you want to buy a busted Tesla, go for it. Just make sure you take it in for your recalls.

The measle weasle

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., photo purchased from AP Photos.

I will never understand why Trump or anyone else would trust our healthcare to guy who has taken such abysmal care of his body over the years by pumping it full of heroin and testosterone supplements that he somehow attracted a literal brain worm that then died inside his head, whose deep red affect and mottled complexion makes it look like he’s been put through a literal meat grinder, and who continues to voice vaccine skepticism to the point where he sounds not only physically unwell, but also pretty loony.

Well, in an interview with Trump pal Sean Hannity on Fox this week, our Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr (the thought still makes me shudder down to the core of my soul) shared his deep thoughts on the growing Texas measles outbreak (a post TikTok took down from my account, with its AI bot claiming that posting the HHS secretary’s own words violates their “community guidelines…” which is why I’m primarily posting here on Substack and not there, or on Meta. But I digress … ) And here it is:

Basically he thinks it might be better if everyone just caught the measles … which is properly insane.

Meanwhile you know what else is insane? Trump’s economic policies. Polls show Americans are quickly turning against the Erratic Mister Trump and 56 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy. Even the folks at CNBC are starting to say it out loud. Here’s Steve Liesman this week, admitting that he’s speaking up at the risk of his job.

What the regime requires for friends of the king

We have reached the point in our maga autocracy where federal workers are getting cashiered for refusing individual favors to Trump’s friends, like giving Mel Gibson, the occasionally violent former Hollywood star, his gun rights back. That’s what happened to the pardon attorney for the US justice department. Notably, Gibson was sentenced to probation for domestic violence in 2011 and lost his right to carry.

And then comes a newly re-installed Donald Trump. The Guardian reports:

The pardon attorney is a non-political role, supervising matters of clemency and recommendations for presidential pardons. Elizabeth Oyer was appointed under Joe Biden’s presidency in 2022. She told the Times she had been working on a project to restore gun ownership rights to some people convicted of crimes and misdemeanors, a power held by the justice department but not often used.

A list of 95 candidates was whittled down to nine by senior figures, Oler said, then “sent … back to me saying: ‘We would like you to add Mel Gibson to this memo.’”

According to the Times, Oyer was also sent a January letter from Gibson’s lawyer addressed to two senior justice department officials, James McHenry and Emil Bove, “arguing for [Gibson’s] gun rights to be restored, saying that he had been tapped for a special appointment by the president and that he had made a number of big, successful movies”.

On 16 January, four days before starting his second presidency, Trump said the 69-year-old star of Mad Max, Braveheart and other blockbusters had been named, alongside two other veteran actors, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, “special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California”.

Oyer told the Times: “Giving guns back to domestic abusers is a serious matter that, in my view, is not something that I could recommend lightly, because there are real consequences that flow from people who have a history of domestic violence being in possession of firearms.”

You’ll recall that Emil Bove was one of Trump’s criminal attorneys in the New York hush money case that made him a felon, and Bove is also the guy who threatened to fire every attorney in the Southern District of New York until someone agreed to drop the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams last month.

Here is part of Oyer’s interview with CNN’s Caitlin Collins this week:

A bit more reading:

Adam Serwer on how Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run for ending free speech in America.

The Bulwark on the state propaganda the regime is running on trusted Spanish language news networks trying to scare nonwhite immigrants into self-deporting and the outrage that’s causing at Univision and Telemundo.

As Trump’s tariff threats seem to change by the hour, Wall Street is growing dazed and confused.

Fox is literally delusional, and telling its viewers to just ignore the economic mayhem they surely see and feel around them.

Greenlanders vote hard no to Trump’s takeover threats.

And karma may finally be coming for right wing, Trump loving Cubans…

The Trump administration is weighing including Cuba and Haiti on a list of countries whose nationals will face restrictions to enter the country, sources with knowledge of the ongoing discussions told the Miami Herald.

Cuba, which is on a State Department list of countries that sponsor terrorism, might end up on a “red list” of countries facing a total travel ban, while Haiti might end up on a less restrictive version of the list, the sources said.

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump directed officials in the administration to come up with a list of nations that could be part of an expanded travel ban similar to the one he introduced during his first term for countries with Muslim majorities, based on the idea that they have a weak security apparatus to do background checks.

We tried to tell y’all.