Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day instead. There are great documentaries about him and others involved in the fight against oppression and autocracy.
How come the Democrats cannot hold hearings on Judge Cannon,the Supreme Ct judges, or the Republican shennagans: They should develop their own Think tanks like those the Republicans use to find holes in the laws of the land to break those laws and get away clean
I'm looking forward to when it slowly dawns on the white Christian nationalists and wannabe theocrats that the techbros are atheists, and want all the power too.
Then when all the crabs in the bucket slowly realize Trump doesn't give a shit about any of them.
Jack Smith was smart to resign. Who needs this crap? Some do it to pamper their egos. Or for the money. This is not individual Jack Smith I believe. He is a true and devoted man of the law who would not be bought or intimidated in anyway and he has the smarts to know what lies ahead. A very wise move on his part.
Well that made me feel better. Short of the forensic audit the election deserved and a dissection of Musk's money and undue influence, hoping for fisticuffs amongst the participants in the shit show that is this Republican party is something to root for.
The thing about the far right is that they know what they don't like, which is fair enough, but they never come up with any realistic alternatives. They cover this up with a lot of shouting about "the deep state" whatever that means other than what they want to rule and "woke" a definition that would describe Jesus if he was around. Sadly this works on those afflicted with the MAGA virus until it may not. Here are things that all Americans except the very wealthy like: Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, minimum wage hikes, and the ACA. Coincidentally, these are all targets of Project 20Meatheads25, and in their badly written and reasoned white, very white paper they are almost entirely focused on destroying, eliminating and depopulating with, again, no alternative that bears the slightest resemblance to reality.
Can most institutions use a hard look and probably some revisions to make them work more efficiently for everyone? Yes. But that isn't what the laughable "efficiency crew" is actually up to. Instead, they are figuring out how to gut the government to pay for more unnecessary tax cuts for them, along with a deregulatory free-for-all that would wreak havoc on the health and welfare of real, live people. To make things particularly lethal, Project Pie-in-the-sky wants to replace experienced civil servants with their own trained bots which would inevitably lead to mass defection to the point of complete dysfunction.
This is the problem with hard-core ideologues with rigor mortis. They cannot bear to think about anything that might make their "beliefs" untenable yet most of their core beliefs fall squarely into that category. Take for example Medicaid, which helps the poor and the elderly. They can indeed make a program disappear, but not the people who depend on it. Nowhere in their plans is a solution but a look back to the time before such programs existed will show a very ugly sight, particularly in one if not the richest countries in the world. People dying prematurely, families starving, the elderly without shelter, etc. The same is true of affordable insurance where people can't get kicked off or denied for having a preexisting condition which in some cases meant pregnancy?!? Right wing alternative = NOTHING.
When my father, a physician was asked why he volunteered in clinics well into his dotage he replied that communicable diseases don't discriminate, which is why the anti-vaxxers are such a threat. It's also news for the uber-wealthy who think they are going to escape pandemics and the effects of climate change, but I have long ago digressed from the point, which is, that once the average person realizes what trump and his clown car want to do, I have the feeling it will be like the curtain coming up on the "Wizard" of Oz.
Very interesting points. I too read the infamous PNAC document which was one of the reasons I never believed the supposed raison d’ete, nor do I think that many of the people who supported the invasion including Democrats did either but it was a political snowball that just kept rolling and enlarging as it went in the wrong direction.
I don’t view the need for a societal wake up call as conservative. It’s just true. I feel like too many in this country are in a solipsistic, every man for himself, morals be damned stupor. Ironically I think it’s because they do see things now as apocalyptic and react by throwing their hands up in a display of nihilism. The fires in LA where I have many friends are horrific and at the same time that those in the existential crisis are reacting admirably, as a community. But on the other hand you have politicians playing the blame gaimevor worse. Of course they have to figure out exactly what happened and take actions to try to remediate, but where is the “this isn’t the time to discuss that” when it doesn’t involve guns? To support your thesis, I also think Elon Musk’s lack of knowledge about this country’s history or how government works beyond his government contracts is striking and informs his ideological idiocy.
The idea of a "need" for a societal wake up call is _profoundly_ conservative. It's in the bit of Stoic wisdom, memefied by the alt-right, that Hard Men create Good Times / Good Times create Weak Men / Weak Men create Bad Times / Bad Times create Hard Men. It is redolent of two Ur-conservative ideas, that History cyclical and that we're all chained to Fate. Survey the people throughout our history who bewail that America is going soft and nine times out of ten, you'll find a warmonger.
9/11 was a wake up call that woke up nothing good. In the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe, we can all come together in cooperation and for a few moments it seems like a new dawn is rising. But it rarely if ever lasts. There are good, moral, middle class people on this substack who can hardly wait for Trump to collapse the economy because boy, that'll show those Trump supporters. This makes my skin crawl. Only half the people voted for the motherfucker. Why should the rest of us have to suffer?
This kind of perverse wishful thinking pervades right-wing accelerationism and revolutionary Communism, the idea that things have to hit absolute bottom before they can get better. History belies this at every conceivable turn. Before someone brings it up, the American Revolution was a secession; the economy didn't change.
But you know this is exactly where Trump's mind is going. America is all soft and soy and cucked and beta and we need a few good wars. The Vietnam war had the Best and the Brightest, McNamara's computers and the Gulf of Tonkin (which was as much a propagandistic figment as the Maine explosion in the Spanish-American war), Iraq and Afghanistan had their cold war-nostalgic neocon cabal, but the entire country had PTSD from 9/11. Trump has no casus belli(s) to exploit. If he launches so much as one military incursion against an otherwise friendly country, he loses his base.
Sixty years after the Civil War, we had an enormous Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. Eighty years after the end of WW2 and thirty years after the end of the Cold War, we have a generation of people who don't understand why we built the administrative state in the first place. I hate to sound like one of those conservative historians (although Rick won't mind), but it seems the human race needs a fresh memory of calamity in order to progress.
Speaking of white papers, remember "a new Pearl Harbor to awaken America's moral purpose" in the PNAC document that gobsmacked everybody when we began digging into the reasons Dubya wanted to invade Iraq? Well it didn't turn out that way, did it.
Vietnam taught us the way we fight wars now is to put them on the credit card and hire the underclass to fight them. No mess, no smell, no black heel marks. Everybody can go back to watching sitcoms and "patriotically" buying useless shit at the mall. Bush's catastrophic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan had the exact opposite social effect that the neocons were yearning for; with justified torture, warrantless wiretapping and Total Information Awareness, they created the myth of the demonic Deep State that enthralled former cold warriors and ultimately destroyed the GOP. It created the horseshoe pipeline that led ardent leftist critics of the Bush war machine, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Julian Assange, Tulsi Gabbard, countless others, to become symps for Putin and, de facto or de jure, supporters of Trump. It awakened America's _im_moral purpose.
Speaking of the war machine hiring the underclass, I can't imagine what's going on in the service right now, all those anchor babies and undocumented who were promised citizenship after a tour, and then the hazing they're no doubt enduring from the white supremacists who burrow into the military like syphilis spirochetes.
Excellent right on schedule congratulations! Warmer weather will be welcome!
Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day instead. There are great documentaries about him and others involved in the fight against oppression and autocracy.
Thank you, Betty Fieldler.
You got it. Now do it right and don't fluff it up knot head.
Thanks again for replying. Just hang in there with the rest of us. Okay...
How come the Democrats cannot hold hearings on Judge Cannon,the Supreme Ct judges, or the Republican shennagans: They should develop their own Think tanks like those the Republicans use to find holes in the laws of the land to break those laws and get away clean
Thank you, Daydream Believer. Have a great weekend this 2025.
Thank you, Daydream Believer. Have a great weekend.
Thanks, Ken Grade. Have a wonderful and safe 2025 year.
MAGA has already reached its peak. It gonna get harder for them!!!!!
Thank you Rick!
La Resistance needs small victories and rays of hope.
Trump can’t take away our values or dignity, ever!
Every day we suit up, show up and fight these pieces of shit; the more hope is spread to more freedom loving Americans.
Thank you, Elizabeth. I still believe that it's best to be your best. You can live with yourself then. Happy New Year and be safe.
Thanks, Nancy F. Be safe and happy in 2025.
I'm looking forward to when it slowly dawns on the white Christian nationalists and wannabe theocrats that the techbros are atheists, and want all the power too.
Then when all the crabs in the bucket slowly realize Trump doesn't give a shit about any of them.
Jack Smith was smart to resign. Who needs this crap? Some do it to pamper their egos. Or for the money. This is not individual Jack Smith I believe. He is a true and devoted man of the law who would not be bought or intimidated in anyway and he has the smarts to know what lies ahead. A very wise move on his part.
Well that made me feel better. Short of the forensic audit the election deserved and a dissection of Musk's money and undue influence, hoping for fisticuffs amongst the participants in the shit show that is this Republican party is something to root for.
The thing about the far right is that they know what they don't like, which is fair enough, but they never come up with any realistic alternatives. They cover this up with a lot of shouting about "the deep state" whatever that means other than what they want to rule and "woke" a definition that would describe Jesus if he was around. Sadly this works on those afflicted with the MAGA virus until it may not. Here are things that all Americans except the very wealthy like: Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, minimum wage hikes, and the ACA. Coincidentally, these are all targets of Project 20Meatheads25, and in their badly written and reasoned white, very white paper they are almost entirely focused on destroying, eliminating and depopulating with, again, no alternative that bears the slightest resemblance to reality.
Can most institutions use a hard look and probably some revisions to make them work more efficiently for everyone? Yes. But that isn't what the laughable "efficiency crew" is actually up to. Instead, they are figuring out how to gut the government to pay for more unnecessary tax cuts for them, along with a deregulatory free-for-all that would wreak havoc on the health and welfare of real, live people. To make things particularly lethal, Project Pie-in-the-sky wants to replace experienced civil servants with their own trained bots which would inevitably lead to mass defection to the point of complete dysfunction.
This is the problem with hard-core ideologues with rigor mortis. They cannot bear to think about anything that might make their "beliefs" untenable yet most of their core beliefs fall squarely into that category. Take for example Medicaid, which helps the poor and the elderly. They can indeed make a program disappear, but not the people who depend on it. Nowhere in their plans is a solution but a look back to the time before such programs existed will show a very ugly sight, particularly in one if not the richest countries in the world. People dying prematurely, families starving, the elderly without shelter, etc. The same is true of affordable insurance where people can't get kicked off or denied for having a preexisting condition which in some cases meant pregnancy?!? Right wing alternative = NOTHING.
When my father, a physician was asked why he volunteered in clinics well into his dotage he replied that communicable diseases don't discriminate, which is why the anti-vaxxers are such a threat. It's also news for the uber-wealthy who think they are going to escape pandemics and the effects of climate change, but I have long ago digressed from the point, which is, that once the average person realizes what trump and his clown car want to do, I have the feeling it will be like the curtain coming up on the "Wizard" of Oz.
Very interesting points. I too read the infamous PNAC document which was one of the reasons I never believed the supposed raison d’ete, nor do I think that many of the people who supported the invasion including Democrats did either but it was a political snowball that just kept rolling and enlarging as it went in the wrong direction.
I don’t view the need for a societal wake up call as conservative. It’s just true. I feel like too many in this country are in a solipsistic, every man for himself, morals be damned stupor. Ironically I think it’s because they do see things now as apocalyptic and react by throwing their hands up in a display of nihilism. The fires in LA where I have many friends are horrific and at the same time that those in the existential crisis are reacting admirably, as a community. But on the other hand you have politicians playing the blame gaimevor worse. Of course they have to figure out exactly what happened and take actions to try to remediate, but where is the “this isn’t the time to discuss that” when it doesn’t involve guns? To support your thesis, I also think Elon Musk’s lack of knowledge about this country’s history or how government works beyond his government contracts is striking and informs his ideological idiocy.
The idea of a "need" for a societal wake up call is _profoundly_ conservative. It's in the bit of Stoic wisdom, memefied by the alt-right, that Hard Men create Good Times / Good Times create Weak Men / Weak Men create Bad Times / Bad Times create Hard Men. It is redolent of two Ur-conservative ideas, that History cyclical and that we're all chained to Fate. Survey the people throughout our history who bewail that America is going soft and nine times out of ten, you'll find a warmonger.
9/11 was a wake up call that woke up nothing good. In the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe, we can all come together in cooperation and for a few moments it seems like a new dawn is rising. But it rarely if ever lasts. There are good, moral, middle class people on this substack who can hardly wait for Trump to collapse the economy because boy, that'll show those Trump supporters. This makes my skin crawl. Only half the people voted for the motherfucker. Why should the rest of us have to suffer?
This kind of perverse wishful thinking pervades right-wing accelerationism and revolutionary Communism, the idea that things have to hit absolute bottom before they can get better. History belies this at every conceivable turn. Before someone brings it up, the American Revolution was a secession; the economy didn't change.
But you know this is exactly where Trump's mind is going. America is all soft and soy and cucked and beta and we need a few good wars. The Vietnam war had the Best and the Brightest, McNamara's computers and the Gulf of Tonkin (which was as much a propagandistic figment as the Maine explosion in the Spanish-American war), Iraq and Afghanistan had their cold war-nostalgic neocon cabal, but the entire country had PTSD from 9/11. Trump has no casus belli(s) to exploit. If he launches so much as one military incursion against an otherwise friendly country, he loses his base.
Checkmate.
A very white paper, indeed.
Sixty years after the Civil War, we had an enormous Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. Eighty years after the end of WW2 and thirty years after the end of the Cold War, we have a generation of people who don't understand why we built the administrative state in the first place. I hate to sound like one of those conservative historians (although Rick won't mind), but it seems the human race needs a fresh memory of calamity in order to progress.
Speaking of white papers, remember "a new Pearl Harbor to awaken America's moral purpose" in the PNAC document that gobsmacked everybody when we began digging into the reasons Dubya wanted to invade Iraq? Well it didn't turn out that way, did it.
Vietnam taught us the way we fight wars now is to put them on the credit card and hire the underclass to fight them. No mess, no smell, no black heel marks. Everybody can go back to watching sitcoms and "patriotically" buying useless shit at the mall. Bush's catastrophic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan had the exact opposite social effect that the neocons were yearning for; with justified torture, warrantless wiretapping and Total Information Awareness, they created the myth of the demonic Deep State that enthralled former cold warriors and ultimately destroyed the GOP. It created the horseshoe pipeline that led ardent leftist critics of the Bush war machine, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Julian Assange, Tulsi Gabbard, countless others, to become symps for Putin and, de facto or de jure, supporters of Trump. It awakened America's _im_moral purpose.
Speaking of the war machine hiring the underclass, I can't imagine what's going on in the service right now, all those anchor babies and undocumented who were promised citizenship after a tour, and then the hazing they're no doubt enduring from the white supremacists who burrow into the military like syphilis spirochetes.
Is Trump going to deport them, too?
Thanks, Linda Morway. Hope you have a splendid 2025 with much good luck and happiness.