Why did Trump just pardon the 'biggest scam artist' in the auto industry?

— DOGE plans to re-program Social Security. Social Security runs on an older COBAL programming language and, while it’s a bit creaky, it works just fine. But the DOGE wrecking crew — we learned the day after Musk went on Fox “News” and lied repeatedly to America’s seniors — now plans to replace the entire system with something newer.

This is the kind of project, messing with 70 million people’s earned benefits, that should take a year or two with multiple layers of redundancy and safety; instead they say they’ll do it in a few months. What could possibly go wrong? A lot, as WIRED reports a senior Social Security technologist told them: “Of course one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se but [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions.” The big concern is that they might end up crashing the entire system.

Again, from WIRED’s interview: “This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape. The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

Which raises another question; why are these guys who are supposed to be looking for “fraud and waste” reprogramming this system? Is it to make it harder for people to get their benefits so seniors will sign off on a “Social Security Advantage” privatized program the way they have with the privatized Medicare Advantage? Is it so they can build back doors into it? What’s the game here? Why the hurry? Something stinks…

— Are Trump and Putin carving up the planet? Somehow, American media missed the story that Putin, visiting an arctic submarine base this week, proclaimed, “Not long ago I said we’d grind them [Ukraine] down — now it looks like we’ll finish them off.” Trump, meanwhile, is making more absurd demands of Ukraine including that they give up half of their gas, oil, and minerals in exchange for…nothing. No security guarantee at all. Just give it to us and trust us. Right…

Also this week a Russian researcher who’d criticized the war in Ukraine and thus found asylum in the US working at Harvard University was stopped by Customs and Border Protection flying home from a conference in Paris and her phone was grabbed; now she’s in that notorious private prison that ICE uses in Louisiana, where all the anti-Netanyahu student protestors are currently illegally incarcerated, and Trump is threatening to send her back to Russia where she’ll probably spend the rest of her life in a gulag. On top of that, Trump this week repeated twice his threat to seize Greenland. (The Vance advance team went door-to-door in Greenland trying to find even one family that would invite the VP and his wife in for tea and cookies and couldn’t get a single taker.)

And the prime minister of Canada just formally broke relations with the United States, ending an alliance that goes back more than two centuries. Trump is destroying our alliances, threatening our neighbors and allies, and generally doing everything Putin would want him to do to wreck our reputation around the world. Any guesses as to why? Leave your comments below…

— Trump’s message to America: Scam the people, get a pardon. In 2022, Trevor Milton was convicted of a massive fraud involving the phony hydrogen-powered-truck-company Nicola, having scammed investors out of over $600 million. Trump just pardoned him, and the entire auto industry is boggled. Why would he issue such a pardon? Nobody knows, but many are betting Milton has greased Trump’s palms or those of somebody in his family. After all, now that he has a pardon Milton is not required to pay back any of the money. Inquiring minds want to know what’s going on here…

— The resistance in America is alive and doing well: stay engaged! Over 1400 academics have called for a boycott of Columbia University for their free speech crackdown in deference to Trump’s demands. At the same time, researchers have discovered that America is currently experience a nearly unprecedented wave of protest against the naked corruption and fascism of the Trump administration. Today, protests at Tesla dealerships are planned around the world, and next Saturday (April 5) will see protests in virtually every town and city in America. Will Trump try to use violence to crack down on dissent like his role models Putin and Orbán routinely do? Stay tuned…

— Bribe the president, get an exemption from pollution rules? The Trump EPA has just put out a new email address to fossil fuel companies where they can make their case privately to Trump himself, asking for relief from pollution rules. This is the guy who offered to entirely deregulate the industry if they’d give him a billion dollars; it appears this is the same scam only on a more incremental basis. Once a scammer, always a scammer…

— Georgia police jailed another woman for having a miscarriage. One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage, so it wasn’t a rare occurrence when a 24-year-old Georgia woman lost her fetus at 19 weeks and disposed of the remains in a dumpster behind her apartment building (there are no laws mandating any other form of disposal). A neighbor called police, however, and now she’s in jail facing 13 years in prison for “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body.” It wasn’t a “person” or a “body,” of course; it was a fetus. But that doesn’t appear to matter to the male supremacist men who run Georgia. This is just the latest in a long string of incidents where women have been criminalized for having miscarriages, a practice that’s gone on steroids since six Republicans on the Supreme Court allowed states to criminalize abortion. Even though this and multiple other miscarriages had nothing to do with abortion or abortion drugs, they’re still running full octane on their war on women.

— Scientists are alarmed as the Trump administration goes to war against mRNA science. Seriously folks? One of the great scientific breakthroughs in the past few decades has been the development of mRNA technology; vaccines are currently in development for a wide variety of serious diseases as well as a vaccine that could prevent or even cure cancer. None of that matters, though, in Bob Kennedy’s weird anti-vax world as public health experts freak out over the NIH preparing to pull millions in funding from ongoing mRNA research. These people appear not to care how many Americans die…

— Crazy Alert!Tucker Carlson Says He Doesn’t Want to Fly on a Plane with a Vaccinated Pilot: “It’s Too Dangerous.” For the record, while there have been a few cases of inflammation of the heart (myocarditis) associated with the Covid vaccines, the risk of getting that condition is massively higher with a simple Covid infection itself. Nonetheless, science genius Tucker Carlson is worried about flying on a plane with an unvaccinated pilot. Tinfoil hats, anybody?

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