Saturday Report 5/17/25 — Trump ordered 15K workers to snitch and not a one did...

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

— “Huge scandal”: Internal documents catch Trump administration in massive Social Security lie. When Elon Musk proclaimed that “40 percent of the calls into Social Security are fraudulent” anybody with any knowledge of the system knew he was lying; the question was, “Why is he lying like this?” Now we’re seeing the answer in real time. After that phony proclamation (and Doge laying off 7,000 SS workers), Social Security put into place draconian “anti-fraud” measures that radically slowed down the process of applying for benefits when you turn 65 or are eligible because of disability or the death of a parent, spouse, etc. Claim processing times have increased by 25 percent, as the new “anti-fraud” measures caught a mere 2 attempts at fraud out of the first 110,000 applications, and those were fraud attempts that the old system probably would have caught anyway. Just like with the GOP’s “voter fraud” claims that they use to justify preventing Democrats from voting, this BS claim appears to have a single, simple purpose: to make the experience of interacting with SS so painful that people will gratefully accept a privatization/takeover of the system by the nation’s biggest banks (who will then kick back a portion of their profits to Republican politicians). You’ll recall that after we all heard Trump’s multiple lies about Social Security fraud in his State of the Union address, I wrote a Daily Take here saying that he’d just kicked off the first step toward gutting, and probably privatizing, Social Security. After all, this has been the goal of the GOP ever since FDR signed Social Security into law in 1935. And now, with this leaked internal document showing Musk’s scam for what it is, here it is. As former SS Administrator Martin O’Malley noted, “I’ve been saying it all along: Elon Musk is the biggest fraud, not Social Security.”

— How Trump’s “Emergency” Powers Could Become Permanent. Ross Rosenfeld just published a fascinating article in The New Republic pointing out how the word “dictator” came from the first emergency proclamations in the early Roman Republic. For over a century, emergency powers were used sparingly and surrendered when the emergencies were over; Cincinnatus famously stepped in during emergencies three times to be “dictator” and each time quickly retired back to his farm, an example that George Washington cited when he refused to run for a third term in 1796. The danger comes, history shows, when emergency powers that suspend normal rights and privileges become permanent, as happened in Rome when Sulla, and then Julius Caesar, used emergency powers to end democracy and make themselves dictators for life. The concern today is that Trump appears to be trying to do something similar, making phony emergency declarations (like the supposed “invasion” from Venezuela, the “energy emergency,” and the “border emergency”) in order to suspend habeas and due process rights and justify deporting people and jailing students who write articles critical of him. Of all the areas where Democrats should focus their ire and efforts, challenging his bogus emergency declarations should be at the top of their list because they are so deadly to democracy. And we need to let our elected officials know that we’re concerned about this naked assault on our Constitution and the rights it confers on us.

— Trump orders the FBI to lay off white collar crime in favor of hunting immigrants...Plus, apparently they’re now harassing American journalists. Reuters reports that the FBI has ordered its agents to deprioritize white collar corporate crime and instead spend their time looking for brown-skinned people who’re in America without permission. The head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, Matthew Galeotti, wrote to agents that “overbroad and unchecked corporate and white-collar enforcement burdens U.S. businesses and harms U.S. interests.” Right. We wouldn’t want to inconvenience the corporate criminals, would we? Meanwhile, the border police have taken to stopping American journalists at US points of entry to interrogate them about what they’re saying about Trump. One of the most popular streaming voices in the country, Hasan Piker, is an American citizen (born here) with 4.5 million followers on YouTube and Twitch and, on a flight back from a vacation in France, was stopped at the Chicago airport and shunted into an interrogation room for hours. Questions ranged from his opinion of Netanyahu and his policies to what he’d said and thought about Trump. This is shockingly wrong, although five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized it some years ago, giving ICE and CPB the right to snatch people anywhere within 100 miles of a US coast, which includes about 70 percent of our population. Democracy advocates worry that this is just the beginning of widespread intimidation and repression leading America down the road already trod by Russia and Hungary.

— Georgia is forcing a brain-dead woman to complete her pregnancy and making her family foot the bill. Thirty-year-old nurse Adriana Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she experienced a fatal stroke, leaving her brain-dead and unable to breathe. Because of Georgia’s 6-week ban on abortion, however, doctors refused to let her die and instead put her on life support machines, turning her body into an incubator over the loud objections of her family. To add insult to injury, the Georgia hospital is demanding that her family pay for all the medical expenses — that could run into the millions — to keep her breathing until they can deliver the baby by C-section several months from now. As Jessica Valenti writes, “Corpses have more rights than a pregnant person in these states with abortion bans. How many families are they going to devastate?” Frankly, the answer is probably “as many as they can”: these people don’t give a damn about the woman or the family; all of that is eclipsed by their fetus fetish. And that GOP “concern” will vanish, of course, the day the baby is born and somebody has to pay to raise and educate it.

— Trump ordered 15K workers to snitch & not a one did. This is one of those rare good news stories. Lee Zeldin was one of the most anti-environment, pro-chemical Republicans in the House back in the day, and now he’s running Trump’s EPA. Recently he sent out an email to 15, 000 workers in that agency asking them to rat out programs, policies, and people that/who are DEI friendly. And not a single person replied. There’s your smile for the weekend! :)

— Geeky Science: Does 7000 steps keeps cancer away? The 10,000 steps a day craze was debunked years ago when it turned out to be a promotional campaign by a Japanese company that made pedometers (which measure your steps). But now, the first real science on the issue is in and it’s fascinating. In a six-year-long study of 85,000 adults in the UK, researchers had them wear devices that measured their steps and then tracked their health outcomes with a specific eye to cancer. What they found was remarkable: at 7,000 steps a day, cancer risk is reduced by 11%, 9,000 steps drops the risk by 16%, and after that additional walking doesn’t seem to confer much benefit. They looked at 13 types of cancer including esophageal, liver, lung, kidney, gastric, endometrial, myeloid leukemia, myeloma, colon, head and neck, rectal, bladder and breast. Interestingly, it didn’t matter how fast people walked or how much they exercised; these benefits seem to derive from the simple act of walking. So, get out there and take a walk!!!

— Crazy Alert! Why is the DHS looking at producing a reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship? Move over, Hunger Games: the Department of Homeland Security is looking at rolling out a reality TV show where immigrants compete with each other to mine gold, assemble automobiles, and roll logs like a lumberjack. In the final episode, a “famous politician” (like Trump?) will swear the winner in as a citizen, along with giving him prizes like a million miles on American Airlines and free Starbucks and gasoline. I’ve been saying for years that the only thing Trump is good at — the only real success he’s ever had in his life — is as a reality TV show host. GE/NBC spent millions training him and he practiced it for about a decade on Apprentice: that’s why everything he does has a reality TV show flavor, from his cabinet meetings to his press conferences to his meetings with foreign leaders. It’s a tragic commentary on the state of America that our voters would find such a thing appealing, but here we are.

Here’s your moment of Zen which provoked an angry rant from Donald Trump yesterday: