American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

What disarray? It was completely unfied. Every democrat other than manchin was determined to get rid of Trump once and for all. Who wants him in their morning news? Only the 20% MAGA base. It was in fact the coalition of voters that keeps Democrats at near 50% that Trump captured in some manner. Or we failed to convince the voters that 2024 was as bad as 2020. Show up and vote!

Trump’s win was not a landslide, however. He gained less than half the national popular vote and only beat Kamala Harris by 1.5 percentage points. Republicans lost some key races in the Senate and only retained the House of Representatives by a wafer-thin margin. Opinion polls show that three in four Americans opposed pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists.

Some question whether the realignment is permanent. John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “It’s certainly an effort at a rightwing revolution, politically consolidating his base, taking advantage of disarray on the other side, putting points on the board and clearly changing the direction and tone. Now, is this a revolution or is it a Thermidor [the short-lived reactionary coup during the French Revolution]? We’ll have to wait and see.”

For all his early momentum, commentators argue, Trump’s political revolution cannot last. He faces splits within the Republican party in Congress and the Maga movement and an electorate demanding quick results. He sabotaged his own first term with his notoriously short attention span, unwillingness to read policy documents, and fostering of chaos and dysfunction.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... first-week

[Tero]

Michael Steele says stop compromising. No more bipartisan Kumbayah.
https://www.threads.net/@shopped2much2/ ... teKT6TOsoQ

[Svartalf]

- A state senator in Mississippi has filed a bill entitled the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act.”

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

https://www.wlbt.com/2025/01/22/mississ ... ction-act/

Wankers unite...

that page (404) quoted the onion did it not?

[Svartalf]

Hunting down the 'illegals' will Make America Great Again.

'Central Valley farmworkers scared to show up to work over deportation fear'

<snip>

Food for thought.

but none produced for the masses, or what produce there is gets wasted and spoilt for lack of gatherers

[L'Emmerdeur]

- A state senator in Mississippi has filed a bill entitled the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act.”

As written by Sen. Bradford Blackmon, the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

There are also fines involved, the third strike resulting in the loss of $10,000 from the perpetrator.

https://www.wlbt.com/2025/01/22/mississ ... ction-act/

Wankers unite...

that page (404) quoted the onion did it not?

It's not the Onion but I believe it is intended to poke a stick in the eyes of the Handmaid's Tale creeps of Mississippi.

[Svartalf]

I'd love to have a couple handmaids... but I don't guess they'd be willing

[Tero]

Our state university ran a sociology survey

The story reports on some new data gathered by the University of Nebraska - Lincoln's Bureau of Sociological Research. They gathered data from 2,232 Nebraskans during the summer of 2024.
"Statewide, about two in five Nebraskans report having conservative or very conservative political views, while 34% say they are middle-of-the-road and 25% hold very liberal or liberal views.

"Similarly, 41% of Nebraskans also self-identified as Republican, 28% reported being a Democrat and 31% reported as independent or other."
"The largest variance among Nebraska residents regarding political views is tied to place of home residence. Among residents who live in the open country or on a farm, 64% said they hold conservative or very conservative views, while only 8% reported liberal or very liberal views. The responses for town or city residents were more closely split, with 29% reporting very liberal or liberal views, 35% claiming middle-of-the-road views, and 36% reporting conservative or very conservative views.

"Meanwhile, 68% of those living in open country or on a farm said they were Republican, with 13% saying Democrat and 19% describing themselves as independent or other. For town or city residents, 35% said they were Republican, 31% said they were Democrat and 34% said they were independent or other."

And we were all fine here, just squabbling on what federal money to take and what to reject.

And then we got Trump. It has not been the same. Two governors were mini Trumps.

[Tero]

The ‘Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly’ of the United States Government
Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an “on-premise” email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees—one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system—used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans each year (a national-security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden, a democrat from Oregon)—as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems, according to Reuters.) Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.

Two days before the 2024 election, I wrote that Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter was going to be the blueprint for his potential tenure at DOGE. Unfortunately, I was right—he’s running the exact same playbook. But it’s worth keeping in mind that there are two ways of measuring success for Musk’s projects: first, whether the organizations themselves benefit under his leadership, and second, whether Musk himself gets something out of the arrangement. Musk’s stewardship of X has been a financial nightmare. He has alienated advertisers, tanked revenue and user growth, and saddled investment banks with debt from the purchase that they’ll need to sell off. Yet Musk’s own influence and net worth have grown considerably during this time. His fanboys and the MAGA faithful don’t care that X is a flailing business, because Musk did deliver on giving liberals their supposed comeuppance by de-verifying accounts and reinstating banned trolls. He turned the platform into a conspiratorial superfund site, has boosted right-wing accounts and talking points, and helped elect Donald Trump as president. Musk’s purchase is a success in their eyes because he succeeded in turning X into a political weapon.

The Atlantic

[Tero]

Even headline editors are wimps. What it should have been all along:

Elon Musk and DOGE are hacking the government

Musk has embraced Silicon Valley’s most notorious instincts to “move fast and break things” in a lightning battle to muscle into the computer systems and power structures of federal agencies. As he did with his corporate takeover of Twitter in 2022, he has brought in a team to assess details such as office building leases, budget line items, vendor contracts and the performance of individual employees — with the stated intention of radically downsizing the organization.

With a cadre of engineers as young as 19 years old, and with the encouragement of Trump, Musk has demanded and been given access to sensitive government databases and the Treasury Department’s payment system with an unprecedented series of bureaucratic maneuvers.

There are deep concerns among many Democrats and some Republicans that Musk — and his staff members who are not government workers and are not bound by the same ethics and rules that apply to federal workers — are acting in secret, without accountability and potentially against the law in the Trump administration’s effort to shrink the federal government.

DOGE is an office within the Executive Office of the President, according to a Trump executive order from Jan. 20, and Musk has been named a “special government employee,” according to a White House official. It is a temporary position that allows him greater access, but it also bypasses some of the disclosure obligations required of full-time government employees.

DOGE’s targets include the U.S. Agency for International Development, which closed its headquarters Monday in anticipation of shutting down entirely. Musk’s DOGE has staff members working at the Treasury Department, which pays the government’s bills, and he has said on X that he wants to slash or overhaul the Government Accountability Office and the Education Department.

A person who has been affiliated with Musk’s SpaceX is working as an adviser to the FBI director, NBC News has reported. The White House Office of Personnel Management has offered federal employees the option of taking “deferred resignations,” or buyouts, in an echo of Musk’s Twitter shakeup.

Inside the offices of USAID, more than 1,000 staff members and contractors have been fired or furloughed because of a near-total freeze on foreign assistance, and the agency’s security leaders were put on administrative leave Saturday after they tried to prevent DOGE employees from accessing secure systems, NBC News has reported. At least some of the DOGE employees had insufficient security clearances, sources have said.

“If DOGE attacks USAID today, then you can be sure they’ll move on to another target tomorrow. Who knows, maybe it’ll be the Postal Service or the IRS or even the Social Security Administration?” he said.

Musk did not respond to an email request Monday for an interview.

It was not clear what Musk and his DOGE team planned to do with their access to sensitive data, such as Treasury records of all payments made by the government, but in social media posts, Musk has openly mused about cutting federal jobs, canceling contracts, stopping payments or selectively releasing records to illustrate his points about alleged waste. It is a playbook he has already used; he selectively released internal Twitter documents after he bought the company, arguing that the previous management had been politically biased.

Many Democrats — and even some Republicans — say the attempted unilateral remake of the federal government is unlawful, as Trump and Musk have shoved aside not only career civil servants but also the authority of Congress itself.

“It’s a potential constitutional crisis,” said Brian Riedl, a former Senate Republican staff member who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. In a phone interview, he said he was concerned that Musk’s power is going unchecked.

“Someone with as much power as Elon Musk has should be Senate-confirmed,” he said. “There needs to be some accountability to Congress and the voters.”

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Musk was breaking the law.

“An unelected, unaccountable billionaire with expansive conflicts of interest, deep ties to China and an indiscreet ax to grind against perceived enemies is hijacking our nation’s most sensitive financial data systems and its checkbook so that he can illegally block funds to our constituents based on the slightest whim or wildest conspiracy,” she said at a news conference Monday at the Capitol.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ ... rcna190450

[Sean Hayden]

So, should we even be paying taxes at this point?

[Brian Peacock]

Well, it's either that or the police start paying themselves by tribute.

[Sean Hayden]

Get off my land!