I am not a Social Security recipient but even if I was: Why am I getting an email from SSA celebrating this legislation? How is this an appropriate use of that ostensibly massive database?

All I keep thinking about is that if/when Dems regain power, every action to restore normality or basic functioning of governmental institutions will be covered by the national press like it’s a controversial, partisan power play on par with a coup.

That “HE GETS US” ad is funded by an extreme right wing org. Using Johnny Cash’s cover of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” - a scathing critique of right-wing televangelists preying on the unwary - is a spectacular self-own.

The same Republicans saying we have to cut all these programs because the debt is out of control are going to enthusiastically back Trump’s trillions in tax cuts for the rich that will explode the debt (again)

Drama between DOGE & the Treasury, a timeline:

Monday, January 27, 2025, Scott Bessent was made Treasury Secretary by President Trump.

Bessent is a former hedge fund manager and investor, he was a partner at Soros Fund Management and the founder of Key Square Group.

A man with no institutional or electoral legitimacy has taken control of a branch of the U.S. government & is shutting down its operations and legal obligations, to put it plainly.

The guy last seen in public doing a sieg heil Nazi salute "moves with lightning speed" to seize the U.S. government? I'd even go so far as to call it a lightning war. A blitzkrieg, if you will.

"DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup."

So if I’m understanding today correctly, the world’s richest person Elon Musk, whom no one elected, is taking over federal payment systems and employee data while the federal employees who investigate and prosecute public corruption are being fired en masse.

Do you know why a president would do all the most evil and heinous shit via Executive Order? Because his party can't easily make it law. And if they can't make it law, they can't make it last.

Don't let anyone make you feel like this is The End. Do not let them demoralize you. Live to see them die.

How do people who don't watch college football know what it's like to simultaneously feel alive and like you want to die?

i've still got no comparisons for this story to anything else in american politics in my lifetime

Americans rely on litigation to constrain corporate behavior where most other countries use bureaucratic regulation. It’s why we are comparatively “so litigious.” But everywhere — in discrimination, privacy, consumer cases, and here insurance — that lone constraint is dissolving….