At tonight's NAACP's Image Awards, one of those honored was Kamala Harris. Accepting the Chairman's Award, Kamala observed of our struggling nation:
This organization came into being at a moment when our country struggled with greed, bitterness and hatred. And those who forged the NAACP, those who carried its legacy forward, had no illusions about the forces they were up against - no illusions about how stony the road would be. But some look at this moment and rightly feel the weight of history. Some see the flames on our horizons, the rising waters in our cities, the shadows gathering over our democracy, and ask, "What do we do now?" But we know exactly what to do, because we have done it before, and we will do it again. We use our power; we organize, mobilize, we educate and we advocate. Because, you see, our power has never come from having an easy path. Our strength flows from our faith - faith in God, faith in each other, and our refusal to surrender to cynicism and destruction. Not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. Not because victory is guaranteed, but because the fight is worth it.
While she demonstrated strength, courage and patriotism, Donald Chump, the Convicted Felon also spoke this weekend.
Here are some of the lies that Daniel Dale (CNN) caught Chump telling:
Trump’s poll numbers: Trump repeated a false claim he made on Friday,
saying his “poll numbers” are the highest “that any Republican
president has ever had.” He didn’t specify what numbers he was referring
to, but his approval rating has been in the 40s and 50s in major recent polls, not even close
to the best of all time for a Republican president. George W. Bush hit
92% shortly after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001; George H.W.
Bush hit 89% at the end of the Gulf War in 1991; and the peaks for
Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Dwight Eisenhower ranged from the high
60s to the high 70s, according to data collected by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.
US aid to Ukraine vs. European aid to Ukraine: Trump repeated a false claim he made earlier in the week and many times prior, saying that Europe has given Ukraine just $100 billion in aid while the United States has given Ukraine $350 billion. He claimed this disparity happened “because we had a stupid, incompetent president and administration.”
In fact, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank that closely tracks wartime aid to Ukraine, the European Union and individual European countries had collectively committed far more total wartime military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine through December (about $258 billion) than the US had committed (about $124 billion). Europe had also allocated more military, financial and humanitarian aid (about $138 billion) than the US had allocated (about $119 billion).
The US did have a slim lead in one particular category, military aid allocated, providing about $67 billion to about $65 billion for Europe. But even that was nowhere close to the giant gulf Trump described.
The prevalence of autism 15 years ago: Trump again grossly exaggerated the increase over the past two decades in the prevalence of autism among children — correctly saying it is now 1 in 36 but falsely saying that, 15 years ago, it was in the “vicinity” of 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 20,000. In fact, public statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the known prevalence in 2010 was 1 in 68 children, not even close to Trump’s figures.
While Kamala spoke of our shared history and vision, as David Smith (GUARDIAN) observed, the convicted felon spent his time bragging, "Donald Trump’s 75 minutes at CPAC talking about himself." Peter Aitken (NEWSWEEK) notes Chump's destroying jobs, "While the full number remains in flux due to the legal challenges, some of which remain in appeal while the others await rulings, but around 200,000 workers have been potentially impacted by the cuts."
But enough of Chump The Lady In Waiting, let's turn our attention to his Love Master Alien Musk. Peter Kafka (Business Insider) notes:
- Elon Musk's X — the thing we used to call Twitter — lost lots of advertisers after he bought it.
- Now he is trying to get them back and, reportedly, using the implied threat of government interference to do so.
- This seems like an opportunity for people concerned about government involvement in social media to pipe up. When will that happen?
Here's a 100% hypothetical scenario: Say a Big Tech CEO calls up a big ad agency and tells them it'd be a good idea to spend more money with his company. Because if they don't, he knows people in the US government …
I know, I know. That would never happen.
Except that maybe it has been happening. And the person who is allegedly sending that message is Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X.
Which is, of course, owned by Elon Musk, who works for Donald Trump, donated more than $250 million to Trump's presidential campaign, and also conducts joint interviews with him.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Yaccarino and her lieutenants have been pressing Interpublic Group, one of the world's biggest ad agencies, to get its clients to spend more money on X. Hanging over IPG's head: a proposed deal to sell itself to rival Omnicom, which may need regulatory approval in the US.
IPG execs interpreted X's messaging as a reminder that the Trump administration could slow down that deal, according to the Journal's veteran ad reporter Suzanne Vranica, citing several unnamed people close to the matter.
KEITH: The White House says Musk will file a confidential disclosure of his financial interests with the Office of Government Ethics by the end of next month and has been briefed on ethics requirements. As a special government employee - a temporary role - he doesn't have to divest from his businesses, but he is supposed to recuse himself when necessary. Fox says there's little indication the normal process to avoid conflicts is being followed.
FOX: The thing that the public should be concerned about is, well, we don't know. Is he looking after our interests as taxpayers and citizens, or is he looking after his own business interests?
KEITH: These questions about Musk come up as Trump just fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, along with other watchdogs. Richard Briffault specializes in government ethics at Columbia Law School and describes Musk as basically a walking conflict of interest.
RICHARD BRIFFAULT: Whatever the guardrails - and I guess that phrase, guardrails, is being used a lot - but whatever the guardrails are there in terms of preventing public officials from engaging in self-dealing, enforcement seems to be gone.
KEITH: A White House official not authorized to speak about this publicly dismissed the criticisms as partisan, saying there is no concern in the White House about whether Musk will follow strict ethics rules.
Elon Musk might be tweaking the “Community Notes” feature on X after he disagreed with the way it was fact-checking Russian propaganda, but his own AI bot Grok continues to call him out.
Thursday, Musk tweeted that he was “working to fix” Community Notes, accusing it of “increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.”
Isaac Saul, the founder of the nonpartisan outlet Tangle, gave Grok the task of analyzing “for truth and veracity” the last 1,000 posts Musk had posted.
Grok’s response was to find more than half of Musk’s posts “false or misleading,” wrote Saul, and most of the tweets that were true were “simply updates about his companies.”
False or misleading. Who checked Alien's job references before hiring him? Brian Barrett (WIRED) observes:
Within just the last week or so, Elon Musk’s DOGE hit team of mostly young, almost exclusively male engineers and executives have done the following:
- Pushed a website live to track “savings” that showed no savings for several days and made it trivially easy for random people on the internet to make changes to it.
- Published classified information on that same website.
- Got called out for accidentally inflating that savings amount by $7.992 billion, and doubled down on their inaccuracy before they fixed it.
- Fired hundreds of people who work on nuclear security, then scrambled to rehire them, except they had nuked all the work email addresses and personnel files so they didn’t know how to get in touch.
- Basically the same deal, except with the US Department of Agriculture employees working to protect the country from a looming bird flu crisis.
- Rehired a 25-year-old engineer with a stack of racist tweets to his name.
- Spouted a bunch of nonsense conspiracy theories about who’s getting Social Security benefits. (OK, that was all Musk.)
That’s just a sampling. It doesn’t include the damage born of purging thousands of workers across multiple government agencies, the consequences of which will reverberate in both obvious and unexpected ways for a generation—not to mention the near-term impact that spiking the unemployment rate will have on the US economy. It doesn’t include the opportunity cost of tossing hundreds of government contracts and programs into a bonfire.
We did not vote Alien Musk into office. We did not vet him nor did our representatives in Congress. He really should be given a one-way ticket to South Africa or any other country. He does not belong here. He is not one of us nor has he attempted to become one of us. All he does with his third citizenship is use it to try to destroy our country.
People aren't silent in the face of the destruction that Chump and Alien are carrying out. The Center for American Progress notes:
How the Privacy Act of 1974 restricts DOGE’s access
The Privacy Act sets a clear general rule: A government agency cannot share someone’s personal records with anyone—including other government agencies—unless that person gives written permission or formally requests it. While the law provides 12 exceptions permitting disclosure without consent, DOGE and the federal agencies in question can, at most, attempt to argue that two apply. However, even those are unlikely to legally support the extent of their alleged disclosures. These exceptions include:
- Agency Use Exception (§ 552a(b)(1)). This exception allows for the disclosure of records within the agency to employees who require access to perform their official duties. The key limitation of this exception is that access must be necessary for the employee’s job function. It does not permit broad or indiscriminate sharing of records nor does it authorize disclosure to individuals outside the agency.
- Routine Use Exception (§ 552a(b)(3)). The routine use exception permits agencies to disclose records for purposes that are compatible with the reason the information was originally collected. However, for an agency to invoke this exception, the routine use must be explicitly defined and published in the Federal Register before any disclosures occur. This safeguard ensures that agencies do not arbitrarily expand data-sharing practices beyond their initial intent.
Subsection (c) of the act requires agencies to keep detailed records of when and to whom they disclose personal records. This provision ensures transparency and accountability by mandating that agencies track the date, nature, and purpose of each disclosure as well as the name and address of the recipient of the information. Importantly, individuals have the right to request a list of disclosures made about them, except when the records were shared for law enforcement purposes.
To enforce its protections, the Privacy Act imposes both civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of records. If an agency’s violation of the law results in harm to an individual, that person has the right to sue the agency in civil court. If the court finds that the agency acted intentionally or willfully, the government is required to compensate the individual for actual damages, with a minimum award of $1,000, plus attorney’s fees and litigation costs. Additionally, agency employees who willfully disclose protected personal information to unauthorized individuals or maintain a system of records without proper public notice can be charged with a misdemeanor and fined up to $5,000. Likewise, any person who knowingly obtains agency records under false pretenses is subject to a misdemeanor charge and a fine of up to $5,000.
Alien is abusing his post. Ryan J. Reilly (NBC NEWS) notes:
Billionaire Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to federal employees Saturday, saying in a post on his social media platform X that employees must respond to an email justifying the work they completed this week or resign.
Federal employees have already begun receiving an email asking to summarize their work, sources familiar with the matter told NBC News, though unlike Musk’s post, it does not explicitly threaten a forced resignation.
When is Alien going to receive his ultimatum?
Tommy Christopher (MEDIAITE) reports on a Saturday townhall:
A town hall in a plus-thirty GOP district erupted in a sustained standing ovation over a blistering rant calling President Donald Trump a “tyrant” who “named himself king.”
Trump’s first weeks in office have been characterized by a string of successful Cabinet nominations and a relentless testing of executive power and governing norms. Many critics saw Trump’s social media declaration “Long live the King!’ as emblematic of that approach.
That was certainly the case when Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) — who endorsed Trump in 2024 after first supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — faced constituents at a town hall meeting in Roswell, Georgia on Thursday.
A woman named Virginia Lim prefaced her scathing question to McCormick by referencing her familial connection to the Founding Fathers — then laid into Trump:
VICTORIA LIM: Thank you so much, Congressman, for taking my question. I do so appreciate it.
I’m a direct descendant of Susanna Henry Madison, one of Patrick Henry’s younger sisters and a cousin by marriage of James Madison.
Do you know who Patrick Henry was? And James Madison, sir? (NODS)
I’m so glad to hear that. While arguing the need for the American Revolution, Patrick Henry said “A king is a tyrant. If a wrong step is made now, the Republic will be lost forever and tyranny will rise.”.
I believe you know the rest of his speech. Something about “give me liberty.”.
It’s clear from all the writings of our Founding Fathers that our great Republic was never meant to be ruled by a dictator, nor a king.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
So. So you can imagine my shock and pure horror when I woke up to find that our president had given himself unprecedented executive powers, and then, within a few days, named himself King to his followers. (APPLAUSE).
Tyranny. Tyranny—!
MODERATOR: Virginia. Do you have a question for the congressman?
VICTORIA LIM: I do, I do. Thank you. Tyranny is rising in the white House, and a man has declared himself our king. So I would like to know. Rather the people would like to know what you, congressman, and your fellow congressman are going to do to rein in the megalomaniac in the White House.
(CROWD STANDS AND CHEERS).
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you!
REP. RICH MCCORMICK: Thank you. I’m not going to give you my best Foghorn Leghorn response to that. But what I was — so you can go ahead and sit down — thank you.
The — when you talk about tyranny, when you talk about presidential power, I remember having the same discussion with Republicans when Biden was elected.
(JEERING).
The funny thing is, the funny thing is —
(JEERING CONTINUES).
The funny thing is, you’re sitting here in your body, you would probably say those January 6ers who were yelling just as loud as you, who were upset just like you, and not listen —
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
MODERATOR: Hey, hey, hey, let’s restore some order! Let’s restore some order! Hey hey hey, let’s restore some order!
REP. RICH MCCORMICK: So yelling, yelling at me is not going to get any answer, okay? Hey, like I said, like I said, we’re not going to give order right now.
MODERATOR: Let’s get through this. Congressman.
AUDIENCE: Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!
REP. RICH MCCORMICK: I’ve seen Game of Thrones, too. Thank you.
Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "The Point THE NEW YORK POST Missed" and "White House Service: Donald Tries To Please His Man" went up today. He's got one going up right after this as well. The following sites updated:
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