Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) says Republicans’ next goal is to kick seniors off Social Security: “Get off of Social Security. Get back into the workforce.” pic.twitter.com/GGW8Gz7Iq6
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) June 6, 2025
Do you think this is just one nut? I’m afraid not. It doesn’t matter if it’s Trump or Bush or Reagan or Nixon. These people have always wanted to destroy Social Security. They hate it. They truly believe that if you didn’t have the foresight to become a millionaire you have to face the consequences. That’s why they shrieked like harpies when the Democrats passed Obamacare and why they are taking this big chance with Medicaid now. If they could end them overnight they would.
“We’re all going to die,” said Joni Enst. If you’re a loser who forgot to make enough money to fully support you when you get old you’ll just have to die a little bit sooner.
Could be. Unfortunately. Chris Geidner with the latest:
On Friday afternoon, heading into the weekend, the U.S. Supreme Court told the Trump administration that the non-department Department of Government Efficiency can more or less do what it wants.
In a pair of orders on the shadow docket, the court’s conservatives — over the objection of the liberal justices — allowed DOGE to access individualized, sensitive Social Security data for all Americans even as they prevented Americans from being able to access information about DOGE.
In the first case, a lower court order that blocked DOGE’s access to data from the Social Security Administration was stayed during litigation — meaning, DOGE gets access.
As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for herself and Justice Sonia Sotomayor:
The Government wants to give DOGE unfettered access to this personal, non-anonymized information right now—before the courts have time to assess whether DOGE’s access is lawful. So it asks this Court to stay a lower court’s decision to place temporary and qualified limits on DOGE’s data access while litigation challenging DOGE’s authority to access the data is pending. … [O]nce again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them.
[…]
The majority, meanwhile, barely provided any explanation. In a three-paragraph statement — which was issued neither per curiam (for the court) nor in the name of a specific justice — the court stated the basic facts, the standard for a stay, and its conclusion:
After review, we determine that the application of these factors in this case warrants granting the requested stay. We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work.
That’s it. They had nothing more to say.
In the other case, the Supreme Court again granted the Trump administration’s request for a stay — and did so, again, over the objection of the liberal justices. This time, though, the conservative justices prevented access to DOGE’s data.
This order came in a case brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and it relates to whether DOGE is subject to public records requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — or whether it is, in effect, exempted for now from such requests as a presidential record. As part of that determination, the district court issued an order that certain evidence be turned over. DOGE objected, and, on Friday, the Supreme Court held that even that minimal discovery was too much.
So DOGE can know everything about us but we can’t know anything about DOGE.
The president always gets the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the unitary executive. As expected. But you would think that they’d see that this fatuous monster proves that it’s much too risky to allow the president to have this much unfettered power. So far, I’m not hopeful. They have their priors and nothing that imbecile does shows them the error of their ways.
Reporter: How seriously are you considering canceling Musk’s contracts?
Trump: We’ll take a look at everything. He’s got a lot of money— a lot of subsidy. So we’ll take a look. Only if it’s fair for him and the country, I would certainly think about it.
Michael Cohen knows a thing or two about Trump’s views about loyalty and revenge. Here’s what he said a week ago:
Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal attorney, predicts he will “go after” tech billionaire Elon Musk’s money now that the Tesla CEO’s time as a special government employee has finished.
“I said from the very start that this bromance was going to come to an end,” Cohen said on MSNBC. “I’m going to go one step even further, again, and I’m going to say Trump will ultimately go after Elon’s money next because it bothers him that he is the richest man in the world.”
As those of you who have read me throughout the Trump era know, I believe that vengeance is really his only true philosophy of life. Besides money and fame, it’s the only thing that motivates him. He’s a primitive beast.
We’re just going to have to see if Musk pissed him off so much that he needs to go nuclear to set things right. You know he wants to.
Elon Musk floated a new political party on Friday after falling out with President Trump over the big, beautiful bill.
He launched a Thursday poll on the social platform X, which he owns, asking about whether or not the country needed a new faction for political nominees.
“The people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle! And exactly 80% of people agree. This is fate,” Musk wrote, citing numbers from his survey.
He followed up with a potential name for the group, “The America Party.”
It’s deja vu all over again. But this time the rich weirdo who thinks he can save the country is the richest man in the world — and he can’t run for president himself, thank god.
Perot’s attention span was pretty short but Musk’s is shorter so who knows? And if I were to guess Musk will spend a lot of his money sabotaging the Democrats rather than running on any kind of message other than deficit reduction. (Unlike Perot he’d be free trade but racism would easily fill in the blanks.) We’d just have to hope that he would do the same to the Republicans.
Donald Trump’s birthday military parade is a week early. And on the opposite coast.
HAPPENING NOW 🚨: Major ICE raids in downtown Los Angeles, federal agents having to use crowd control as counter protestors throw items at them and their vehicles.
Los Angeles witnessed a series of coordinated immigration raids by United States law enforcement officials on Friday, resulting in the arrest of dozens and igniting widespread protests.
The raids, which were carried out in a military-style operation, have intensified concerns about the force used by federal immigration officials and the rights of undocumented individuals.
Federal agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conducted a series of “immigration enforcement operations” across Los Angeles on Friday morning.
Individuals suspected of “immigration violations and the use of fraudulent documents” were arrested. The arrests were carried out without judicial warrants, according to multiple legal observers and confirmed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Judicial warrants? We don’t need no stinking warrants?
For anyone you know who still believes government should be run like a business, a tale I’ve been here long enough to retell several times.
Back in the age of rotary phones (around 1970), I read about a school bus service in Greensboro or High Point, NC. (Maybe via Ralph Nader.) The owner had purchased a half dozen new buses in another state. His drivers had trouble with them on the trip back. A couple wouldn’t pass inspection brand new. They kept burning out clutches (transmissions?). Despite repeated telephoned and snail-mailed complaints, the owner kept getting the runaround from the area rep, and then from the regional rep. The company claimed that no other customers had had similar problems.
That was a lie. The owner already had a sheaf of complaints from contacting other owners around the country (and the rep knew it). The breakdowns must have been caused by the service’s drivers, the regional rep insisted to his face.
The money quote went something like this:
“He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he was lying anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”
By the way, Kilmar Abrego García, the undocumented immigrant snatched up and sent to a hellhole prison in El Salvador on an administrative error arrived back in the U.S. on Friday.
Behold your federal administration, run by a businessman like his business, and stocked with people who will lie to your faces because it’s company policy.
“He is not coming back to our country. President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story,” Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted in April. “There was no situation ever where he was going to stay in this country. None, none.”
“There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told a Senate hearing in May.
Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed in a press conference that Abrego Garcia had landed back in the U.S., after the government presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant for him. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had initially balked at the idea that he would ever return Abrego Garcia, saying in April that he would not “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the U.S.
Bondi alleged that Abrego Garcia had a “significant role” in a smuggling ring that moved people, as well as firearms and narcotics, and said that the illegal transport of undocumented immigrants was his “full-time job.”
“This is what American justice looks like,” Bondi said, seemingly referring to due process, which she conveniently ignored for the last three months.
No, said several pundits. The charges assembled since Abrego Garcia’s deportation are being reverse engineered as a face-saving move by the Trump administration. Perhaps they have back-channel signals that even the Roberts Supreme Court will not back his open defiance of its April 10 order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return for the due process to which he (and the others still in El Salvador) are constitutionally entitled. Now that he is back on U.S. soil, the government has asked the judge presiding over the case challenging his mistaken deportation to dismiss it.
The administration responded to public condemnation over its flaunting constitutional protections with a smear campaign against Abrego Garcia, branding him a dangerous “convicted” criminal [he isn’t] “and MS-13 gang member despite their thin evidence.”
Forced to back down on their insistence that he would never return, Bondi doubled (or is it tripled?) down on those allegations on Friday in announcing Abrego Garcia had been returned to face charges.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that Abrego Garcia “played a significant role in an alien-smuggling ring.” The criminal charges, filed in the Middle District of Tennessee, allege that Abrego Garcia participated in a nine-year conspiracy that moved thousands of people to destinations across the United States and totaled more than 100 trips. The indictment also accuses him of gun running and drug smuggling.
And more. In her press conference and in the indictment, Bondi threw in a kitchen sink’s worth of hearsay allegations against Abrego Garcia that a federal prosecutor with scruples would not allege without bringing charges. (George W. Bush threw his own kitchen sink’s worth of thinly sourced allegations at Saddam Hussein when he wanted to illegally invade Iraq.) The only two crimes charged in the Abrego Garcia indictment are associated with conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants.
Maybe he’s guilty. Maybe he’s not. Now her team has to prove it in court without lying under oath.
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, in an online press briefing, called the charges against his client “an abuse of power.”
“They’ll stop at nothing at all — even some of the most preposterous charges imaginable — just to avoid admitting that they made a mistake, which is what everyone knows happened in this case,” said attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg.
Yes, there’s fallout:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
Around the time that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was indicted in the Middle District of Tennessee, the chief of the criminal division in that district posted this on LinkedIn: “Earlier today, after nearly 15 years as an Assistant United States Attorney, I resigned…”
But it is the tone, the intensity, and the brazenness of Bondi’s retconning of justifications for Trump 2.0’s denial of fundamental constitutional rights that is most unsettling. The message she sends is that if you belong to a group this administration disfavors, you have and deserve none.
Bondi’s press conference comes just days after the administration announced yet another travel ban. His first in 2017 sparked mass protests at airports. This time, “nothing of the sort,” writes Adam Serwer. “The disparity in reactions helps illustrate how habituated Americans have become to a president who wields his power with discriminatory intentions.”
“The number of disastrous things the administration is doing makes prioritizing difficult for its opponents,” he adds. “But there is also the reality that Trumpism is a kind of authoritarian autoimmune disease, one that has been ravaging the American body politic for so long that there are fewer small-d democratic antibodies left to fight it off.”
And Pam Bondi? She is lying to you. You know she is lying to you. She knows you know she is lying to you. But she is lying anyway, not because she has anything to gain from the lies, but because it is Trump 2.0 company policy.
A happy warrior for authoritarianism, Bondi makes Margaret Hamilton’s witch look like a Junior Leaguer.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that George Clooney brings a live performance of his Good Night, and Good Luck stage play to CNN tonight at 7 p.m. ET. He means to extend its reach beyond its Broadway performance run “to a much larger audience and also return it to its original source.” It will also stream on MAX and on CNN’s website without a subscription. He clearly hopes to send America a message.
UPDATE 2: ICYMI
Since the AG doesn't seem to be getting ethics guidance from her team these days, I wanted to make sure she has the rule in the Justice Manual in front of her, which expressly prohibits this. https://t.co/X5yJKUYzwppic.twitter.com/SOsTMhu5Fj
By now you’ve seen the best of the Trump Musk fight. I know I have. The folks at MSNBC and the Late Night TV hosts, (Meyers, Colbert, Kimmel & Fallon) have had a great time with the feud. My favorite is A Closer Look written by Sal Gentile and produced by Emily Erotas
One of my favorite tactics is the classic, “Let’s you and him fight!” This is an especially good time to use it, for the reason that David Schuster talks about on my friend Cliff Schecter’s YouTube channel Both Trump and Musk retaliate against anyone who comes after them.
Musk brings up Epstein to attack Trump? Cool. When you talk about it on social media, repeat the details mentioned in this video that have been vetted and ask for more from official sources. Also, you should totally subscribe to Cliff Schecter’s YouTube channel ,
if you are still there, post on X, “Musk raises an interesting question about Trump and Epstein. What’s the deal with…. “Hey, ELON MUSK brought this up, I’d like to know more!”
You could post on Truth Social, “Trump raises an interesting question about Musk, what’s the deal with…” “Hey, DONALD TRUMP brought this up, I’d like to know more!”
Then if you really want to push the story forward , talk about this on Mastodon and Bluesky, What I shared on on Mastodon and Bluesky was Marcy Wheeler talking to Nicole Sandler wondering why is Bill Balls still at DOGE and the national security risk of a drug addled Musk having this much power.
After the Trump/Musk fight, the focus needs to be separating Musk from SpaceX & Starlink. It's a HUGE national security issue. @emptywheel.bsky.social is live 5ET/2PT youtu.be/G-soP-sr8y0 or nicolesandler.com, emptywheel.net, nicolesandler.substack.comAlso why is Big Balls still at #DOGE?
The point is that we have ways to give this story “legs” as they used to say in the news business. Look for ways to make their feud hurt each other, using there own grievances and vindictiveness against each other. For example, Trump brought up cancelling Musk’s contracts. Musk threated to decommission the Dragon spacecraft. BOOM. Use that.
My friend Fred had prepared for that by creating a petition at Change.org
Sign it. WE have to do this. The media don’t see it as their job to take down Musk or Trump. But this talk of nationalizing SpaceX gives them the opportunity to talk again about the security threat that a drug addled Musk, whose company controls the launching of 2/3 of our satellites, poses to America.
You will notice how David Shuster discusses Epstein, he choses his words carefully. That’s because of how Trump attacks everyone and sues everyone. We need to be careful, but Musk doesn’t, Trump doesn’t. So use their attacks on each other to drive the stories we want.
The online feud between Elon Musk & Donald Trump impacts perceptions of the Jeffrey Epstein grand jury materials. We can help shape that narrative by talking, tooting, tweeting and skeeting about it. It’s part of how we do politics these days.
“They drew their swords and shot each other. The deaf policeman heard the noise and came and shot the two dead boys. If you don’t believe this story is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.” -Rhyme I learned in Boy’s Life Magazine circa 1967.
I’m not in charge of media or social media strategy on the left, but if I was, I’d suggest that we learn to use the people we have, and to drive the feud where WE want it to go.
One day after Sunny’s first flight away from the nest, the beloved Big Bear bald eagle family experienced a full-circle reunion filled with food, feathers, and what observers believe was critical survival training.
According to a written update from Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV), the day began with Gizmo alone in the nest tree canopy after Sunny’s departure. Shadow soon brought in a fish, which Gizmo dragged away, even snapping at him. When Jackie arrived, Gizmo was gentler but remained determined to protect her catch.
The calm quickly turned to action as Shadow reclaimed the fish and began eating, ignoring Gizmo’s silent plea for a handout. Gizmo, uncharacteristically passive, eventually reached in to steal bites and even tried taking the whole fish again. But Jackie seized the opportunity to steal the fish herself.
As Gizmo fought her for it, Jackie ultimately let her win, what the observers interpreted as a carefully orchestrated survival drill.
“Shadow and Jackie seemed to be challenging Gizmo to make her fight for the fish… like survival training,” the update noted. “But also letting her win.”
Sunny, watching from the Simba Tree, a favorite daytime perch named after a previous chick, Simba, who was first spotted there shortly after fledging on July 23, 2019, soon returned to the nest. She saw the commotion below before soaring back into the nest canopy. Her powerful landing sent twigs raining down on her family, signaling her arrival.
“She first watched from atop the nest, but then leaped her way across and down the branches,” the update stated. Her family watched curiously until she hopped down to join them.
At that moment, Jackie held the fish. Sunny confidently marched over and took it. Gizmo tried once more to tug it away, but Sunny swiftly swallowed the rest whole, ending the matter with quiet authority.
The rest of the day was peaceful. “Sunny stayed in the nest all day, seeming relieved to be home,” FOBBV reported. She and Gizmo shared the front porch of the nest for long periods, reinforcing their bond. Gizmo, inspired by her sister’s flight, spent the day “wingersizing”—flapping and strengthening her wings.
Both eaglets are reportedly thriving. “They know what they are doing, Jackie and Shadow cherish them and they have exciting adventures ahead,” the update concluded.
According to FOBBV, it’s fairly normal for fledgling chicks to return to the nest, who noted that all of Jackie and Shadow’s previous chicks have exhibited similar behavior.
Both Sunny and Gizmo are expected to remain in the natal territory for another one to three months, continuing to learn from their parents before taking off on their own by fall.
If not entirely over, the Trump-Musk alliance is undoubtedly broken.
That leaves the children of this unfortunate marriage — Republican voters, crypto bros, fringe-right pundits, artificial intelligenceevangelists — having to choose sides. Republican politicians have to weigh whether Trump’s support is more valuable than Musk’s money. MAGA influencers on X have to choose between their hearts and their landlord.
One, the elegantly christened accountCatturd, has lined up with the president, apparently prompting Musk to unfollow him. But he’s not alone. Polling released by YouGov in the wake of the conflagration suggests that, among Republicans in particular, there’s not much choice between Trump and Musk.
Asked who they would choose between Trump and Musk, 7 in 10 Republicans said Trump, with another 1 in 8 saying neither. (This, unsurprisingly, was the most common answer from Democrats.) Republicans chose Trump over Musk by a nearly 12 to 1 margin.
