'You can’t lie to the American people' Joe slams Trump for using Heritage Foundation jobs numbers

from MSNBC

 

 

Still Fuming Over a Weak Jobs Report, Trump Finds Some Numbers He Likes

(The data from which these numbers have been derived has never been published anywhere and they say they will try to publish it sometime in the next 6 months. It's secret data only the Heritage Foundation can see. But don't worry. It's accurate. Just ask the neoliberal globalists who put together Project 2025 and Project Esther. They have nothing to hide.) 

from the New York Times

President Trump finally got the economic numbers he wanted. 

Still bristling about last week’s less-than-impressive report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Mr. Trump summoned reporters into the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon to present them with more favorable data.

During an impromptu news conference, the president displayed charts from Stephen Moore, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, that he said proved his economy was better than that of his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“All new numbers,” Mr. Trump said, holding up a chart.

The typically humdrum task of counting jobs, income levels and other economic data has become decidedly dramatic during the second Trump administration. For months, Mr. Trump and his top allies had praised the Bureau of Labor Statistics when it showed strong job growth. But after the bureau put out weak job numbers last week, Mr. Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the agency’s commissioner, and claimed that the figures were rigged. (Instead of offering proof, he said it was “my opinion.”)

The firing of the commissioner, whose job was merely to count the data accurately, left the president in search of some different data, more to his liking.

Enter Mr. Moore.

It just so happened that the Heritage Foundation economist had been crunching some census data, and he began assembling the figures into graphs that he knew would please the president...

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Project Esther: NYT Details Right-Wing Plan to "Rebrand All Critics of Israel" as Hamas Supporters

 (Yeah I am right proud of this image)

from Democracy NOW!

 

RFK Jr. Exposed as the Russ Vought/Project 2025 Neoliberal He Is

by Scott Creighton

During a hearing in the senate a few days ago, Bernie Sanders exposed RFK Jr. as the heartless neoliberal he really is.

When asked if healthcare should be considered a human right in America like it is in almost every single nation on the planet, RFK Jr. dusted off the old neoliberal talking point that smokers cost their neighbors money therefore it should not. 

That's right folks. You can't have universal healthcare because something less than 11% of our population smokes a cigarette every day or every other day.

'In 2022, approximately 11.6% of U.S. adults reported currently smoking cigarettes. This means that roughly 1 in 9 adults in the United States smokes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 28.8 million adults currently smoke cigarettes, according to the CDC.

Current cigarette smoking was defined as smoking ≥100 cigarettes during a lifetime and now smoking cigarettes either every day or some days.' source

The 11.6% number was from 2022 so since the number of smokers decreases every year it's clear that number is lower now in 2025.

Dirty smokers. Yes, insurance companies want smokers demonized at every chance. Seems RFK Jr. is glad to oblige them.

Project Esther, Fed Employees Rehired and Israel Negotiates Like Bank Robbers

 

The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement (Project Esther)

 

from the NYT

In late April, the Heritage Foundation dispatched a team to Israel to meet with power players in Israeli politics, including the country’s foreign and defense secretaries and the U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee.

The conservative Washington-based think tank is best known for spearheading Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for President Trump’s second term that called for reshaping the federal government and an extreme expansion of presidential power.

Now the Heritage contingent was in Israel, in part, to discuss another contentious policy paper: Project Esther, the foundation’s proposal to rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States, along with its support at schools and universities, at progressive organizations and in Congress.

Drafted in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023 and the mounting protests against the war in Gaza, Project Esther outlined an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism by branding a broad range of critics of Israel as “effectively a terrorist support network,” so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered “open society.”

Project Esther’s architects envisioned outcomes that at the time might have seemed far-fetched. Curriculum it believed to be sympathetic to a “Hamas support” narrative would be taken out of schools and universities, and “supporting faculty” would be removed. Social media would be purged of content deemed to be antisemitic. Institutions would lose public funding. Foreign students who pushed for Palestinian rights would have their visas revoked, or be deported.

Once a sympathetic presidential administration was in place, the plan said, “We will organize rapidly, take immediate action to ‘stop the bleeding,’ and achieve all objectives within two years.”

Now, four months after Mr. Trump took office, Heritage Foundation leaders are taking an early victory lap.

Since the inauguration, the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther’s proposals, a New York Times analysis shows, including threats to withhold billions in federal funding at universities and attempts to deport legal residents...

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Policy Expert Details Cruelty and Pointlessness of GOP's Medicaid Work Requirements

from Common Dreams

Days after Trump Cabinet officials championed work requirements in the pages of The New York Times, a progressive policy expert wrote in that same newspaper on Friday that such mandates—particularly for Medicaid recipients—are "cruel and pointless," potentially stripping critical benefits from millions of people through no fault of their own.

The GOP proposal, which advanced out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee earlier this week, would require many Medicaid recipients to prove that they worked or did some related activity for at least 80 hours per month. Republicans are also seeking to dramatically expand work requirements for recipients of federal nutrition assistance.

Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, a left-wing think tank, argued in his Times op-ed that "imposing work requirements on Medicaid is a fundamentally misguided policy," particularly given that "it is employers, not workers, who make hiring, firing, and scheduling decisions."

"Last year, over 20 million workers were laid off or fired at some point from their jobs," Bruenig observed. "Many of those workers ended up losing not just all of their income but also their employer-sponsored health care. Medicaid is supposed to provide a backstop for these workers, but if we tie eligibility to work, they will find themselves locked out of the healthcare system because of decisions their employers made, often for reasons beyond their control."...

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Musk Suggests His Team Will Scrutinize Social Security and Entitlement Spending

from the NYT

Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual, suggested on Monday that his government cost-cutting team would scrutinize Social Security and other entitlement spending, describing the expenditures as rife with fraudulent transactions and repeating a conspiracy theory that Democrats were using the programs as a “gigantic magnet to attract illegal immigrants and have them stay in the country.”

In an interview with Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business commentator who served as Mr. Trump’s chief economic adviser in his first term, Mr. Musk said that his team now numbered over 100 staff members and repeated familiar and unsupported claims about entitlement spending that dovetailed with the great replacement conspiracy theory — the idea that white Americans are deliberately being pushed out by noncitizens — which Mr. Musk has nodded to on other occasions.

“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending, which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements,” he claimed, “so that’s the big one to eliminate.”

Earlier this month, Mr. Musk referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” And he has dispatched members of his cost-cutting team — known as the Department of Government Efficiency — to access databases housed at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal agency that manages the health coverage of more than 100 million people, to flag suspicious payments...

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Peter Thiel has major influence on Trump government – Bloomberg

from RT

Tech mogul and billionaire Peter Thiel exerts considerable influence over US President Donald Trump’s administration, a Bloomberg article has claimed. Unlike Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, however, he prefers to keep a low profile.

More than a dozen individuals connected to Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, have been integrated into the Trump administration, Bloomberg wrote on Friday. This group includes “current and former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his fortune or benefitted from his investments and charitable giving.”

The outlet listed 15 individuals within the government who are seen as having ties to the entrepreneur, five of whom serve in the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Among the officials are Vice President J.D. Vance and AI and crypto czar David Sacks. According to Bloomberg, the former had worked at Thiel’s Mithril Capital, while Thiel reportedly acted as Vance’s “mentor” and sponsor. The tech tycoon is also said to have helped Vance make inroads with Trump in 2021 after the then-Ohio senator publicly criticized the Republican firebrand. Sacks, a longtime associate of Thiel, is also a PayPal co-founder...

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HHS overturns 54-year-old public comment rule

from Healthcare Brew

The new US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rescinded on Monday a long-standing public comment practice at the nation’s largest public health agency—shortly after promising a “new era of radical transparency” last month.

In a policy statement on Feb. 28, Kennedy said the “extra-statutory” public comments “impose costs on the department and the public, are contrary to the efficient operation of the department, and impede the department’s flexibility to adapt quickly to legal and policy mandates.”

Since the move effectively limits citizens from sharing their opinions with the agency, experts have shared concerns that removing these opportunities for public commentary could impede the agency’s ability to operate in the public’s interest.

Lawrence Gostin, a law professor and chair of global health law at Georgetown University, posted on X that the move allows the HHS to “operate in secret” and “ignore the views of key stakeholders.”...

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RFK Jr. rolls back transparency policy on Medicaid and NIH changes

from CBS

RFK Jr. aims to shut down public comment practice after promising a “new era of radical transparency.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ended a longstanding transparency rule on Friday, supercharging his authority to change policies in areas ranging from Medicaid to the National Institutes of Health without advance notice to the public.

Dubbed the "Richardson Waiver" after the former health secretary who issued the rule in 1971, the policy Kennedy repealed had required regulations related to property, loans, grants, benefits or contracts to go through the federal "rulemaking" process.

The law governing rulemaking usually exempts such regulations, but in response to calls at the time to close the exemption, officials voluntarily waived it. This meant that, until now, they would go through the process of notifying the public of their proposals and asking for comments before imposing changes. 

"The extra-statutory obligations of the Richardson Waiver impose costs on the Department and the public, are contrary to the efficient operation of the Department, and impede the Department's flexibility to adapt quickly to legal and policy mandates," Kennedy said in a filing announcing the end of the waiver.

Now health agencies no longer need to go through the notice and comment process for many policy changes about grants and benefits. This includes new rules that could otherwise be stymied by backlash during a public comment period, like potentially adding in work requirements to Medicaid or redrawing how the National Institutes of Health funds research...

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Tech Bro Supervillains Confess World Takeover Plan

The Majority Report

 

The Left is Conditioned to Fear It's Own Convictions

“The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” said Steve Biko

Kyle's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYmlPEDV9BA&t=312s

my article https://nomadiceveryman.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-left-is-conditioned-to-fear.html

Direct Support 

Official Installed by Trump Moves to 'Demolish' Social Security Administration

from Common Dreams

The acting leader of the Social Security Administration reportedly instructed managers earlier this week to draw up plans for a 50% cut to the agency's workforce, a push that advocates and lawmakers said would result in the gutting or total closure of local field offices—and likely benefit disruptions.

The American Prospect first reported the request from Leland Dudek, whom Trump installed as SSA commissioner earlier this month after the agency's former head resigned following a clash with Elon Musk's deputies over their attempts to access highly sensitive personal data. At the time he was elevated to the helm of SSA, Dudek was under investigation for allegedly sharing information with Musk's team improperly.

According to the Prospect, the deadline for SSA managers to comply with Dudek's request for mass-firing plans was Wednesday afternoon.

"The decision could target one of the government's most prominent public-facing initiatives: SSA field offices, where seniors, people with disabilities, and survivors whose parents have died can sign up for benefits and get information," the outlet noted. "In an email to the Prospect, SSA would not confirm any reductions in its workforce beyond the abolition of two small internal offices announced this week... Sources have speculated to the Prospect that the terminations are being done piecemeal to avoid headlines of tens of thousands of jobs lost."...

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21 federal tech workers resign rather than help Musk ‘dismantle critical public services’

from PBS

More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.

The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning...

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Don't Normalize DOGE Business Plot: It's a Fascist Coup

Don't Normalize DOGE Business Plot: It's a Fascist Coup

Direct Support 

Top U.S. & World Headlines — February 14, 2025 - Democracy NOW!

 

Fired Inspectors General Raise Alarms as Trump Administration Moves to Finalize Purge

from the New York Times

The Trump administration on Monday ordered former staff members for as many as 17 fired inspectors general to immediately arrange for the return of work laptops, phones, parking decals and ID cards — even as questions remained over whether President Trump broke the law in dismissing independent watchdogs.

Some of the fired officials were seeking to raise alarms about what had happened. Among them was Mark Greenblatt, whom Mr. Trump had appointed as the inspector general of the Interior Department five years ago and who had led an interagency council of the watchdog officials until the new year.

“This raises an existential threat with respect to the primary independent oversight function in the federal government,” Mr. Greenblatt said in an interview. “We have preserved the independence of inspectors general by making them not swing with every change in political party.”

He warned that the credibility of the inspectors general would be at issue if Mr. Trump put in “lackeys that are rubber-stamping his programs and exonerating allegations for his own people willy-nilly.” Doing so would give the next Democratic president incentive to fire them all, too, setting off “a never-ending cycle of politicization.”...

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Elon Musk is waging war on a key check on his business empire

from CNN

Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 with the hopes of turning it into “the everything app” that will let users zap money to each other and where they could eventually conduct their “entire financial world.”

Days after Musk attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration this year, Twitter, now known as X, made its first major step towards building a financial ecosystem. X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced the launch of a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments platform in partnership with Visa, to be launched later this year.

Now, Musk is at the forefront of the effort to gut the primary federal financial regulator overseeing the payments business: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“RIP CFPB,” Musk posted on X last week, with a tombstone emoji.

Hours later, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is led by Musk, deleted the CFPB’s X account and was granted access to the consumer watchdog’s systems, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. Since then, the CFPB’s acting director has instructed employees to “stand down” from all work – including fighting financial abuse...

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Bernie Sanders: Oligarchs Are Our Modern Day Kings