Opinion

— 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.

Despite all my moaning since a slim majority of Americans decided it was safer to carry on with their lives walking a tightrope without any safety nets, than it was to stay grounded, and together against the billionaires who have proved over and over again they want to eat us all, I have been mighty proud of the good and righteous people on the Left.

Too many Americans don’t deserve us, but the idea of America does, dammit. Despite being knocked down and staying down on that gray November day, we picked ourselves up and braved the fascist winds that are blowing at a gale off the Potomac right now.

In the past month, Trump has threatened to imprison peaceful protest organizers, falsely declared a national invasion, invoked war powers in time of peace, serially ignored court orders, and sent people to an El Salvador prison without due process or review, all while making outrageous comments meant to distract the public from his administration’s illegal conduct.

This week served up the capper when we learned that Trump officials are coordinating their actions on Signal, an app with an auto delete feature, in violation of multiple federal laws requiring communications to be preserved and protected.

I grew up with a raving alcoholic.To call his behavior erratic is to engage in understatement for dramatic effect.

My dad was in the Navy, assigned to one of the submarines of the Pacific Fleet in Oahu Hawaii, which meant long periods of welcomed absence. But whenever the submarine was docked, he was home, where he vacillated between two states of drunk: wet drunk and dry.

Dear Republicans,

Here we go again. A large chunk of Trump‘s cabinet and our national security leaders just endangered our country and our pilots who were flying over Yemen with their arrogance and frank stupidity.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight was a 1971 movie starring Robert DeNiro about a mafia family in New York that’s led by a buffoon who surrounds himself with other incompetents and thus seems to always screw everything up. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Trump administration.

Over a period of several years, I did consulting work for one of the three-letter federal agencies that keeps our nation secure. It was back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I was the CEO of an Atlanta advertising agency; this work involved how that federal department.

Last week, Donald Trump signed a royal decree (ie, an executive order) claiming that the president has the legal and constitutional right to unwind and shut down the United States Department of Education.

He has no such thing, Joe Walsh reminded us. “He can’t dismantle the Department of Education,” he said. “He doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do it. Only Congress does. He’ll get sued and the courts will rule against him. This is unconstitutional. And that matters more than whatever you think about the Department of Education.”

We’re now at the point where five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have harmed us so severely that our nation is facing an oligarchic takeover, aka a constitutional crisis. Trump is ignoring the courts’ orders and threatening the judges’ lives so blatantly that even Chief Justice John Roberts has been moved to speak out.

The history of America is the history of fits and starts of progress followed by oligarchic backlash leading to periods of pain and stagnation (except for the morbidly rich).

I am mad, I am scared — and right now, I am looking for people who will fight with me against the most dangerous attack on our rights, benefits, and Democracy in my lifetime.

Unless we start punching back hard, and right now, we are not going to survive this, good people.