<Donald Trump may be pleased enough with Elon Musk, but even as the Tesla CEO is exercising his newfound power to essentially undo whole functions of the federal government, he still has to reassure his investors. Lately, Musk has delivered for them in one way: The value of the company’s shares has skyrocketed since Trump was reelected to the presidency of the United States. But Musk had much to answer for on his recent fourth-quarter earnings call—not least that in 2024, Tesla’s car sales had sunk for the first time in a decade. Profits were down sharply too. Usually, when this happens at a car company, the CEO issues a mea culpa, vows to cut costs, and hypes vehicles coming to market soon.

Instead, Musk beamed about robotics, artificial intelligence, and Tesla’s path to being “worth more than the next top five companies combined.” This is the vision he has been selling investors for years: Making cars—a volatile, hypercompetitive business with infamously low profit margins—was only the start for Tesla. Its future business will be making fleets of self-driving taxis and humanoid robots trained for thankless manual labor. Whether his vision has any connection to reality is hotly debated by many AI and robotics experts, but most Wall Street analysts put their faith in Musk. And he has, at times, delivered on wildly ambitious goals. Shares jumped again after the call. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment; a DOGE official did not respond to an email seeking comment.)

Musk gets the benefit of the doubt from investors because—despite undelivered promises, half-baked ideas, and forgotten plans—he has made Tesla worth, on paper at least, more than essentially the rest of the auto industry combined. His funders are asked to buy Musk’s picture of the future, and the recent enthusiasm for Tesla stock suggests they believe that his political influence will help him get there.

Musk needs that belief to hold. Tesla’s stock price is the largest source of his enormous wealth and, by extension, his influence; if his plans succeed, that stock is also his clearest shot at achieving trillionaire status. Right now, though, Tesla’s primary business is still selling cars that people drive, and Musk himself may be the biggest reason that faith in Tesla could falter.

For all of Musk’s ire for the former president, Tesla did very well in the Joe Biden years. The Model Y is the world’s best-selling electric vehicle and its best-selling car, period. The company has comfortably been out of its “money-losing start-up” phase for years. Although the competition among EV makers is heating up, the only individual company close to eating into Tesla’s market share is China’s BYD, which for the first time last year produced more EVs than Tesla did.

Yet that competition can’t entirely account for Tesla’s latest, abysmal numbers. Last year, Tesla sales were down nearly 12 percent in the EV stronghold of California. And in Europe, where Musk is helping supercharge far-right politics, Tesla’s sales were down 63 percent last month in France and 59 percent in Germany. This is happening even as the rest of the worldwide electric market is growing fast; nearly every car company that makes EVs saw sales gains in 2024, some of them huge.

Musk’s activism does seem to be turning off the affluent or middle-income progressive crowd that was traditionally Tesla’s bread and butter. Look no further than how the company’s new, updated Model Y has been received. Musk’s army of fanboys on X was as effusive as ever, but outside the hard-core Tesla bubble, the SUV was met with a flood of Nazi jokes following Musk’s Sieg heil–ish arm gesture at Trump’s inauguration. This type of reaction goes beyond that one car; the Cybertruck has a unique penchant for being the target of vandalism, and people appear to be making a killing selling anti-Musk bumper stickers to disgusted Tesla owners. In covering the auto industry, I can’t go a week without fielding emails from people asking for advice on the best EV alternatives to Tesla—many from longtime Tesla owners who say they’re ready to move on....>

<....In theory, Musk’s rightward turn could help him swap out traditionally liberal buyers for more conservative ones, who usually tend to be more skeptical of EVs. And it’s likely that EVs will become less polarizing along partisan lines over time as electrification becomes more common on new cars. Right now, however, even the deep-red-coded Cybertruck doesn’t seem to be changing many minds about the concept of battery-powered cars. Take a recent report from the EV Politics Project, a nonprofit group that studies the partisan divide over electric cars. Their study indicates that although Musk himself is now viewed much more favorably by Trump voters and Republicans, he’s not leading some seismic shift in how they view EVs.

Nor is he obviously trying to get MAGA voters to buy the new Model Y. In fact, those who follow the auto industry closely wonder if Musk is still interested in running a car company at all. On that January earnings call, he offered only a boilerplate response about “more affordable” new Teslas coming soon; the word Cybertruck was not uttered once. He is, however, clearly focused on the company’s “unsupervised” robotaxi service. (Imagine Uber, except with Model Ys and Model 3 sedans, and with no humans behind the wheel.) He claims that Tesla will launch the taxis in Austin in June, the first step toward turning the company into the AI powerhouse that Musk thinks will make it so valuable. Right now, his AI ventures are separate, but he’s started mingling them with his ambitions for Tesla. Ultimately, his thinking—which he’s articulated in earnings and public appearances over a number of years—is that his roving network of autonomous vehicles can use their cameras to capture huge quantities of data, and those data can be used to train AI networks.

In the immediate future, Musk wants Tesla robotaxis everywhere, as soon as possible, and sleeping next door to the White House could help advance that part of his vision. Critics have expressed concerns that his newfound influence could also help stymie federal investigations into Tesla, which are probing the crash record of the company’s “Full Self-Driving” technology and its claims about the technology’s safety. And his current political position could help eliminate one of his oldest foes: regulations.

Tesla has long clashed with environmental rules (last year, a California judge ordered Tesla to pay $1.5 million over allegations that it mishandled hazardous waste), labor laws (employees at a Tesla plant have said that the company failed to pay overtime, among other alleged violations), and safety ordinances (the company was recently fined for violating California’s workplace-heat-safety rules at one of their plants). But the greatest roadblock to Musk’s vision of robotaxis everywhere is arguably America’s current patchwork of state-by-state rules and regulations for autonomous vehicles, which may allow self-driving cars in some places but not others. No federal standards currently exist, but creating rules favorable to the industry would speed things up—especially if those rules were tailored to especially benefit Tesla.

Musk’s approach to Tesla’s future has more than a few problems that the rest of the self-driving-car industry does not face. Tesla relies solely on cameras and AI for its automated-driving systems, rather than lidar and other more advanced sensors used by competitors. Plenty of experts think Tesla’s strategy can never power true autonomous driving. And Tesla is already years behind robotaxi companies operating in many cities right now, most notably Google’s Waymo. Musk’s Tesla faces the rising threat of China’s advancements in AI too: Investors are noticing BYD’s autonomy-focused deal with tech upstart DeepSeek. And they’re noticing where Musk’s attention lies; as he holds court in the Oval Office, Tesla’s stock has begun losing all those postelection gains.

The most daunting problem, though, may be the same problem Musk has always had: people. Even if he does succeed in tearing down the regulatory state for the sake of his own companies, who’s to say anyone will buy what they’re selling. Any power Musk has in the future depends on turning millions of people into Tesla customers. If he can’t do that—or at least keep convincing investors that he’ll be able to—he’s just another guy screaming online.>

<Two hundred and thirty-five years ago, our nation’s first president, George Washington, wrote a letter in response to Catharine Macaulay, an English feminist and historian. Macaulay wrote to Washington to congratulate him on his new role as the first head of the United States.

History hasn’t paid much attention to this letter, but its words are profound and timely. It offers a view of how Washington perceived his new role as president: not as a vehicle for personal power but rather as a duty of stewardship.

His responsibility, as he saw it, was to facilitate a social contract between the governed and their government. Washington understood that every decision he made from that moment forward would be remembered — and possibly emulated — by future American presidents.

He wrote to Macaulay, in part:

In our progress towards political happiness my station is new; and, if I may use the expression, I walk on untrodden ground ... There is scarcely any part of my conduct [which] may not hereafter be drawn into precedent … [T]he Government, though not absolutely perfect, is one of the best in the World, I have little doubt. I always believed that an unequivocally free [and] equal Representation of the People in the Legislature; together with an efficient [and] responsible Executive were the great Pillars on which the preservation of American Freedom must depend.

But that’s not quite how we’re doing things right now. Donald Trump has been in office for less than a month and he’s already attempting to cripple the federal bureaucracy and federal agencies that were designed to serve the American people.

Meanwhile, the oligarchy backing him has launched an all-out war against federal workers, a retributive attack on the so-called “deep state,” which, by extension, is an attack on the people those nonpartisan civil servants serve: you and me.

Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire who happens to be both the richest man in the world and the current president’s top campaign donor, and his allies have appeared to have quite literally seized control of the technical and operational infrastructure of our federal government, effectively sidelining Congress, which has the constitutionally mandated power of the purse.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that what this new American oligarchy seeks is to relegate Congress to a largely ceremonial role or, perhaps, no role at all.

In his farewell address, Joe Biden warned of this dangerous new threat, what he called the “tech industrial complex” and how it could break our democracy, what Washington called our “great experiment.”

Biden cautioned that there would be “dangerous consequences” if a “concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people” goes unchecked. But it’s not too late.

Across all 50 states, resistance is taking shape. That's despite the Trump administration’s attempts to “flood the zone” with a barrage of presidential pronouncements and orders of dubious legal validity, that are, in large part, designed to distract the media and demoralize the population — or at least the part of the population that opposes the damage Trump and the oligarchy are doing to democracy....>

<....America’s judges are holding the line in some cases and people are in the streets, defending the body politic that is currently under siege.

This fight is not new, even in America. Americans have faced grave challenges in the past: slavery, the fight for women’s suffrage and the fights against racist laws and unjust wars. We have never emerged from them perfectly but, usually and ultimately, we have emerged stronger, more inclusive and more democratic.

The Russian opposition leader and democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza knows all too well the dangers of the growing power of the oligarchy and the toxic combination of a tech-industrial complex and an anti-democratic regime.

In April 2022, in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kara-Murza appeared on “Velshi” and bravely criticized Russia's President Vladimir Putin’s government. When I asked Kara-Murza whether he was worried about speaking out, he told me: “We all know the price. We all know the cost. But we also know that there are millions of people in Russia who categorically oppose the Putin regime and everything it’s doing ... I’m a Russian politician, Russia is my country, Russia is my home and this is where I have to be.”

One day later, Kara-Murza was arrested. He spent much of the past two years confined to a small cell in a Siberian penal colony. He survived two poisoning attempts before that, believed to have been retaliation for his advocacy against corrupt Russian elites.

Kara-Murza was released from Russian prison last August, in a historic prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia. Today, he suffers from polyneuropathy, a nerve condition that affects his ability to feel his extremities, suspected to have been caused by his poisoning at the hands of the Russians.

Like great opposition leaders before him, Kara-Murza’s defining trait is his unwavering sense of duty to his country, at risk to himself and his family. As he explained it to The New York Times in December, “[W]hat moral right do I have to call on my fellow Russian citizens to stand up and resist the dictatorship if I wasn’t prepared to do it myself?”

Since his release, Kara-Murza has been tirelessly lobbying Western leaders to take stronger action against Putin while also working to maintain the morale of Russia’s resistance, both at home and abroad.

In his latest article for The Washington Post, co-authored with fellow dissident Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian activist and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and Ilya Yashin, who was also imprisoned in Russia, the trio focuses on Big Tech’s moral failure, calling out the industry’s complicity in enabling autocrats worldwide:

Every concession to dictators hides a tragedy. In Iran, administrators of opposition media platforms, whose data was handed over to the government, have been executed under the country’s laws. In Russia, tens of millions lost access to uncensored information about Vladimir Putin’s bloody war against Ukraine, leaving them vulnerable to relentless state propaganda ... "But do we really have a choice?" corporate lawyers from Western tech companies argue. "To operate in a country, we must follow its laws!" They see no room for debate.

“[The] principle of ‘following local laws, no matter what they are’ provides a convenient excuse. But it’s just that: an excuse and a moral dodge,” the piece continues. “We believe technology can stop being an unwitting accomplice to dictators and an easy tool for oppression.”>

<Every regular reader knows that the permanently established gas shole perfidubious is a major player in the constant harassment of FTB's account. Pud has formed a small but well-established gang of thugs with behind-the-scenes contact from sea to shining sea....>

Again: who knew I possessed such immense power?

<....Of course, such a known blatant liar will lie, lie, lie about the establishment structure that benefits hiz evil wayz, allowing perfidubious to freely, constantly harass others for years, decades without any significant punishment.

How iz it that perhidious has FTB permanently banned from responding to pud's lopsided personal forum which tramples all posting guidelines with an avalanche of garbage including forged games put in the database, yet pud is able to cyberstalk read/respond to FTB's every post?? Al blocks Freddie from posting in Al's forum, but Al sure has hell follows FTB's every post on this website like a mugger near a retirement home waiting to snatch an old lady's purse in need of some drinkin' and gamblin' money....>

Perhaps, instead of lying himself, for amusement value, <fredthemartyr> should try taking me out of iggydom; that would quickly prove impossible.

<....It is corrupt editor privilege, much of which is aimed specifically at FTB's account for evil purposes. Of course, there have literally been thousands of victims of pervicious' harassment over the years, so FTB is not alone. The difference is the deliberate damage the technology department has done to the various functions (perhaps non-functions is a better term). Even FTB's biography has been routinely hacked!!>

'Thousands of victims'? Really?

<....Now don't go pretending that vermin didn't know that FTB's post content has been shortened while Al's has not. Count 'em up, perfidubious. It's standard operating procedure at CGs to deliberately butcher and illegally discriminate against FTB's account, going so far as to use FTB's account as a guinea pig of technological experimentation which the owner has claimed was not pre-approved.

One well known example is that FTB's personal forum is initially blocked from public view through the public forum that other personal forums can be directly accessed. The only way for the public to view FTB's in particular is to specifically inquire from FTB's home page, meaning a specific extra step, a shield that a would-be reader must know about and get past. Certainly not fair, but such examples of this destruction, restriction mistreatment of FTB's targeted account is not new.

<At last count, the United States’ national debt is more than $36 trillion, more than a fourth of which was racked up during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House. The president has vowed to lower the debt — though he’s never said how or when he intends to do so.

It was against this backdrop that broke new ground over the weekend, telling reporters that the nation’s $36 trillion debt might actually be inflated by possibly fraudulent debt payments. Reuters reported:

“We’re even looking at Treasuries,” the Republican said. “There could be a problem — you’ve been reading about that, with Treasuries and that could be an interesting problem.”

For some reason, the president went on to add, “It could be that a lot of those things don’t count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we’re finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought.”

His comments were, for all intents and purposes, gibberish. But more importantly, they were also potentially dangerous.

“For those not familiar with how financial markets work, US Treasuries are the ultimate safe asset, used as collateral for everything,” economist Paul Krugman explained. “Even a hint that some Treasuries might not be honored could bring everything to a screeching halt.”

The Nobel laureate added that the president and Elon Musk both have a habit of stiffing people they owe money to, and “if markets even suspect that this habit will extend to Treasuries, God help us.”

It didn’t take long for an administration official to start walking back Trump’s comments, telling a Politico reporter that he wasn’t talking about U.S. Treasury notes, but rather, federal payments made by the U.S. Treasury.

Given the actual words the president spoke — out loud and on the record — the walkback seemed exceedingly difficult to believe, but the White House likely realized that it had to clean up the comments before international markets started freaking out.

And so, the potential controversy over Trump’s comments quickly fizzled. As TPM’s Josh Marshall summarized, “[T]his will just end up being something Old Man Trump said on a plane.”

But let’s not brush past the story too quickly. An incident like this one reinforced some key fears about Trump’s understanding of details he really ought to know.

After all, if there’s one thing he should have some basic understanding of, it’s U.S. debt and treasuries — not just because he’s already served a full term as the nation’s chief executive, and not just because he was responsible for adding nearly $8 trillion to the debt (most of it before Covid), but also because Trump, whose businesses have repeatedly filed for bankruptcy, has repeatedly claimed to have some expertise in this area.

The incumbent president is the self-described “King of Debt,” relying on banks and borrowing to finance his business operation for many years.

If Trump thinks he can pretend the nation’s debt load is smaller by pointing to “fraudulent” treasury notes that don’t exist, the political world needs to appreciate the fact that he’s playing with fire that will burn everyone.>

<[Event "14th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1986.07.??"]
[EventDate "1986"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Taylor, Timothy"]
[Black "Gruenfeld, Yehuda"]
[ECO "B22"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<The Republican-led House Budget Committee has advanced a "fiscal framework" that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, NBC News and Politico reported late Thursday.

And at least one Democrat was livid.

The vote came along party lines 21-16, according to the report. The budget resolution now heads to the full House where Republicans hold a razor-thin margin.

The blueprint calls for up to $4.5 trillion in tax reductions, aimed at extending Trump's 2017 tax law and implementing additional components of his tax strategy. The budget stipulates that at least $1.5 trillion in spending must be reduced over the next decade.

The bill also calls for mandatory spending cuts, requiring $2 trillion in cuts to programs including Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP benefits.

Additionally, the bill calls for additional spending — including provisions for up to $300 billion in new border and defense spending — and allowing Republicans to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion, providing a roughly two-year extension.

The budget resolution notably includes flexibility to increase tax cuts if deficit reduction exceeds $2 trillion. If Republicans fail to find $2 trillion in cuts, they will need to limit tax reductions to below $4.5 trillion.

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX), the Budget Committee chair, told NBC News the budget resolution provides the "fiscal framework for what will be one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in modern history and the principal legislative vehicle for delivering on President Trump’s America First agenda,”

"The era of wasteful, woke, and weaponized government is over," he said.

After the bill passed, Arrington said: “It’s time to meet this generational moment and join President Trump in making the tough decisions that preserve our republic for our children and grandchildren. This is our last, best shot to do it.”

Democrats weren't as optimistic.

“This budget rips healthcare away from millions while handing out $4.5 trillion in tax breaks, the overwhelming majority of which go to billionaires and wealthy corporations,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), the top Democrat on the Budget panel, told NBC News. “It slashes at least $230 billion from food assistance programs, at a time when grocery prices remain at record highs. And it proposes, and I hope every American listens to this, it proposes at least $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. ... All so billionaires can get even a bigger tax cut that they don’t need, and the hardworking people in this country can’t afford to give them.”>

<President Donald Trump’s blanket freeze on foreign aid programs has reportedly been halted by a federal judge who slammed the administration’s failure to adequately weigh the devastation its effects could have on hundreds of businesses and nonprofits across the country.

In an order released Thursday, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, a Biden appointee, ruled that the 90-day blanket freeze issued by executive order as Trump returned to the White House last month was an illegal overreach of his power, Politico reported.

The Washington D.C.-based federal judge ordered Trump to reinstate funding for the foreign aid contractors, many of which have had to cut programs, trim employees or cease operations altogether because of the sudden freeze, according to the publication.

“At least to date, Defendants have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shockwave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs,” Ali wrote in the 15-page order.

“Absent temporary injunctive relief, therefore, the scale of the enormous harm that has already occurred will almost certainly increase,” the judge added.

Ali seemed to acknowledge the chaos and uncertainty swirling around the freeze, which reportedly shocked State Department officials and sent organizations scrambling to figure out what their next move would be.

His order also prohibited senior State Department and budget officials – including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought – from enforcing any “contract cancelations or stop-work orders” established after Trump took office.

“There is nothing arbitrary and capricious about executive agencies conducting a review of programs,” Ali said in his ruling. “But there has been no explanation offered … as to why reviewing programs — many longstanding and taking place pursuant to contractual terms — required an immediate and wholesale suspension of appropriated foreign aid.”

The Trump administration was ordered to file a report with the court by Tuesday informing the judge of the status of their compliance.>

<The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Kash Patel was exasperating for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the peek into an alternate reality. Over the course of several hours, a conspiratorial partisan activist, nominated to lead the FBI, joined with the panel’s Republican members to paint a picture that bore little resemblance to the world we actually live in.

As far as GOP senators and the nominee were concerned, Donald Trump’s Russia scandal wasn’t real; the FBI has been corrupted; federal law enforcement was weaponized against Republicans; and Patel is actually qualified to lead the bureau, despite everything we know about him, his record, and his hyper-partisan and conspiratorial worldview.

None of this was true or supported by any evidence. Throughout the confirmation hearing, however, Republicans didn’t appear to care. They prefer this alternate reality, so they pretended as if it were real.

Early on in the hearing, the panel’s GOP chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, declared, “In my hand are a series of FBI emails.” Initially, this piqued my interest because it suggested the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee might actually present the public to bolster his party’s aggressive campaign against the bureau.

Indeed, Grassley, as part of his opening statement in the hearing, specifically boasted that the emails “substantiated” his earlier allegations against the bureau. He concluded that “partisan FBI agents and DOJ officials ... acted in concert to further a political scheme.”

That certainly sounded interesting. If the Iowan’s claims were true, these emails would go a long way toward validating all kinds of criticisms Republicans have made in recent years about federal law enforcement.

There was, however, one nagging problem with these developments. The New York Times reported:

Oh. So the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee waited for a key moment and the national spotlight to release a set of FBI emails, which ultimately showed agents and officials following “standard procedure” and taking “normal bureaucratic steps.”

There may yet come a point at which Republican critics of the FBI and the Justice Department reveal actual evidence of federal law enforcement being “weaponized” against Trump and his cohorts, but GOP officials have been looking for quite a while, and that day has not yet arrived.>

A blatant case of freedom of speech for perv, restrictions for a few others who tell the truth.>

As always, the biggest liar of the lot is the 'poster' obsessed with portraying himself as an exemplar of truth and candour.

Hate ta break it ta ya, <fredcarbuncle>, but yew are a pathological liar on the best day of yer miserable life.

See you next Tuesday.

All rights reserved. Any reproduction, display, presentation, or dissemination of any part of this document and its editions is strictly prohibited publicly and privately including radio, internet, satellite, and photographic transmission.>

Guess what? Stuff your 'copyright'.

Pity your post featuring you actually spelling 'narcissistic' correctly, rather than your standard 'narcistic', was excised.

(Dead link omitted)>

Such concern over ethics from one who has none of his own.

<....No, the scornful cyberbully post remains, but the replies were deleted!! That's an unethical stinking pile of bunk by a lowball monitor. This silent waylaying of member posts has happened 50,000+ times on this website on behalf of the same few troublemakers. perfidubious' never-ending derogatory remarks against thousands of members are allowed to stand while his vulture pal conveniently erases the boisterous opposition. The squelching of members' freedom of speech, one's right to defend themselves -- the deliberate murdered disappearance of the TRUTH by Al's fellow jackass in word crime -- is a long, deep and shameful black mark on this website....>

As an old friend used to say: I'll give you a dime so you can call someone who gives a f***.

<....It is way, way past time that CGs hire an ethical person not presently affiliated with this corrupt website to enforce its own posting guidelines on the bad asses who continue to repeatedly cause chaos with the dishonesty, mischaracterizations, and killing of page commentary. This chronic disease infestation does not have a damn thing to do with good chess commentary.>

<The Washington Post scrapped an ad calling for President Donald Trump to "fire Elon Musk" that was set to run in some of its Tuesday print editions, one of the organizations that ordered the ad said.

The advocacy group Common Cause had agreed to pay the Post $115,000 to run an ad criticizing Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur tasked with cutting government spending. The ad was set to be wrapped around the newspapers, with a similar ad inside the publication, the organization told Business Insider.

The ads are part of a bigger campaign by Common Cause called "Fire Elon Musk." It urges people to sign a petition calling for Musk's removal as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, a commission that aims to slash federal spending and cut regulations. The group says it has collected 60,000 signatures and organized thousands of calls to congressional representatives.

The ad, which Common Cause later posted on its website, features Musk laughing behind an image of the White House and says in large text, "Who's running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?"

Smaller text below the image says the Tesla CEO "has created chaos and confusion and put our livelihoods at risk," adding: "The Constitution only allows for one president at a time."

The group said that the Post hadn't raised concerns about the ad's nature but that the paper informed Common Cause on Friday without explanation that it would drop the wrap ad.

The Post said it would allow Common Cause to run its similar ad inside the paper, the organization said, but Common Cause declined.

"It's deeply concerning that our ad was censored and rejected without a valid reason," Virginia Kase Solomón, Common Cause's president and CEO, and Margaret Huang, Southern Poverty Law Center's president and CEO, said in a joint statement. Common Cause planned to pay for the ads in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center's Action Fund.

"We believe this is limiting our freedom of expression at a critical time in our nation's history. This seems to show the Washington Post is feeling pressure to cover the news a certain way," Kase Solomón and Huang said.

The Post declined to comment on its internal decisions about advertising campaigns. Its ad guidelines say the Post "accepts all types of advertising and does not decline advertising unless there is a compelling reason to do so" but "nonetheless reserves the right to position, revise, or refuse to publish any advertisement."

In addition to helming DOGE, Musk, the world's richest person, runs several companies, including X, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Tesla.

The Post's decision to pull the ad comes just a month after Musk nodded in a series of X posts to a friendship with the outlet's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. Musk and Bezos own competing companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, respectively, and have exchanged playful jabs for years.

In January posts, Musk and Bezos congratulated each other on their companies' rocket launches, and Musk posted clips from the 2008 comedy "Step Brothers," one of which showed its characters asking, "Did we just become best friends?">

Such a free country we live in now, what with intimidation via the mere threat of litigation used to quietly squelch opposition.

<One of X owner Elon Musk's proposed initiatives at the Department of Government Efficiency has been to sell off buildings used by government workers for a quick injection of cash into federal coffers.

However, as The American Prospect's David Dayen explains, the timing of such a sale could be bad at the moment given the current precarious state of the commercial real estate market.

In his latest analysis, Dayen talks to experts who believe that a mass selloff of government real estate at the moment is like "playing with fire" and could be a domino that sends the market for commercial real estate into a downward spiral.

"Older office space is experiencing record vacancy levels, with owners struggling to refinance the buildings," writes Dayen. 'Putting large amounts of it on the market could have dramatic consequences, including damaging the economy in cities like Washington, D.C. It could lead to widespread defaults in financial securities linked to commercial mortgages. And if unchecked, that could lead to broader pain."

Dayen also interviews Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and finance at the Columbia Business School, who argues that "every additional shock is painful" to the commercial real estate market and that he's unsure if the team at DOGE has "thought this fully through."

Things get particularly dicey given the exposures that many banks have to commercial real estate loans, and a major erosion in property values could even spur bank panics, writes Dayen.

"The GSA fire sale is a recipe for generating tons of distress in a market that’s already in trouble, and it could spark something that rages out of control," he warns.>

<Tech billionaire Elon Musk got a temporary win in court this week in his efforts to continue infiltrating and cutting several key government agencies through his Department of Government Efficiency task force — but the victory may be short-lived, MSNBC legal analyst Adam Klasfeld wrote Tuesday evening.

A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general sued over DOGE's authority, claiming that Musk and his software engineers, as special government employees, do not have the power to make these decisions under the Constitution's Appointments Clause as they were not Senate-confirmed officers. They petitioned U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — the same judge who heard special counsel Jack Smith's federal election conspiracy case against President Donald Trump — for a temporary restraining order blocking them from accessing data for seven federal agencies.

On Tuesday, Chutkan found the plaintiffs were ineligible for an emergency restraining order, finding that appointment powers cases like this generally aren't emergencies.

"The court is aware that DOGE's unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion for plaintiffs and many of their agencies and residents," she wrote in her opinion. "But the 'possibility' that defendants may take actions that irreparably harm plaintiffs 'is not enough.'"

But not so fast, Klasfeld wrote. Chutkan had a stark warning for Musk and the Justice Department that, even if they're not subject to a restraining order now, they could end up losing when the case is fully litigated.

"As expected, Judge Chutkan won't issue a sweeping TRO against Elon Musk and DOGE, but she fires this shot across the bow to them both. 'Plaintiffs legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight,'" Klasfeld noted.

In fact, he said, "Judge Chutkan noted in the footnote that neither she nor the plaintiffs heard of a TRO being granted in an Appointments Clause challenge like this, but she suggested they seem to have a 'strong merits argument' going ahead.">