Frida’s Wandering Thoughts

My wife’s car is over twenty-one years old. Just 110,000 miles on it, it’s her car for buzzing around town. It’s a gray Ford Focus ZX5. I surprised her with it after her previous car was declared totaled when it was rear-ended.

The five in ZX5 means the car has five doors, which includes its hatchback. We bought it new. It’s never broken down on us. The engine is terrific, the brakes are always screeching and complaining, the suspension has sports car aspirations, and the seats were shit. I put seat covers on it ten years ago, which greatly improved the interior’s looks.

Worse for me, though, is her car’s transmission. An automatic, it does this clunky downshift which sounds and feels like the engine is falling out. I took it to Ford after the first few times that it happened; they said, “That’s normal.” I replied, “That’s shit.” I wanted to get rid of the car. Get something newer, maybe a hybrid, which would get better fuel economy and have more modern creature comforts.

Wife says, “Nope. I want to keep my car.” That’s that.

She came to me the other day. “My car is making a new noise.”

“Well, it’s old. It’s not a surprise.”

“It groans a lot. Sometimes it sounds like it’s saying, ‘my knees hurt.'”

My wife is a year younger than me, which puts her in her late sixties. I looked at her. “I think you might be projecting, hon.”

She agreed.

Frieda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

Well, gosh darn if another of PINO Trusk’s cabinet members didn’t speak and stun me with his out-of-touch arrogance and stupidity. The honor today goes to Howard Lutnick.

When Howard Lutnick was ‘nominated’ — we use that loosely here, given how the GOTP is rubberstamping everything that PINO Trusk does — for Commerce Secretary, his disclosures showed he had over $806,000,000 in assets. His estimated net worth is $1.5 billion.

Why is this important?

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says his mother-in-law wouldn’t complain if her Social Security check didn’t arrive this month

As the staff cuts at the Social Security Administration leave monthly benefit payments to tens of millions of Americans up in the air — alarming former SSA leaders on both sides of the aisle — Howard Lutnick, the Secretary of Commerce, doesn’t think you should be complaining if your check doesn’t show up.

“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month — my mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t,” Lutnick told All-In Podcast hosts David Friedberg and Chamath Palihapitiya on Thursday. “She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.”

Yes, I’m sure Howard Lutnick’s MIL is very dependent on her social security check to make ends meet. I mean, her daughter is married to a billionaire. Poor darling is probably living hand to mouth – not.

It’s a little bit of a different story for most senior Americans. They don’t have billionaires in the family.

Two-Thirds of Seniors Rely on Social Security for More Than Half Their Income

When the Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley estimated that the program is “the difference between dignity and poverty” for about half of seniors in a May 2024 press release, he may have needed a fact check. The sentiment was right, but the estimate was low: 67 percent of seniors said they rely on Social Security for more than half their income in TSCL’s 2024 Retirement Survey (Figure 1).

Among the survey’s more than 3,000 respondents, 27 percent said their entire income came from Social Security. An additional 20 percent depended on the program for between 76 percent and 99 percent of their income, while another 20 percent depended on it for between 51 percent and 75 percent of their total earnings.

The rest of Lutnick’s comments:

“She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” the billionaire businessman said.

“Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processes, who knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, because whoever screams is the one stealing,” he said. “Because my mother-in-law’s not calling, come on, your mother, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, they trust the government.”

How dare you, Mister Lutnick. I’ll tell you now, I’m 68. I’m drawing my social security, you know, the system which I paid into since I began working when I was sixteen years old. If my check didn’t show up in my account, I would be calling to see what’s going on and why it wasn’t paid. And it’s not because I’m a fraudster. How dare you suggest it. You may work with fraudsters because you are part of PINO Trusk’s administration. It seems like you, as Donald Trump does, might be projecting by claiming people who would call about their social security are fraudsters. We’re not like you, asshole.

One more point to my disgust with your claim, Mister Lutnick. I would have trusted the government to fix it and make it right until January 20, 2025. On that day, my faith in our government became seriously strained. I have no faith in PINO Trusk; I have less faith in DOGE. And my faith in you has precipitously dimmed.

Wonder how long it’ll take before the Trusk Regime claims Lutnick was ‘taken out of context’ or that he’s being victimized by the mainstream media, basically because they reported exactly what he said?

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