Republicans: continued

[Tero]

Nancy Mace being Nancy Mace. This 47 year old has spent her entire time in congress just looking for men in congressional rest rooms.

[Tero]

880 billion is in the list of things to cut, using "energy and budget committee." Sorry for the bad sound.
https://www.threads.net/@brittainforsen ... HoFHQbJAUQ

[Tero]

Why is Trump polling at over 45% approval? I did some math. Those of us following politics know that there are terrible things happening at the federal level. BUT, most of the federal stuff is invisible to those that turn off "terrible news" and just barely see Fox News or MSNBC at times. They do not really know. And the eggs are now at 5.99 a dozen. So who is affected? Let us say all federal workers are worried. Let us say that all of them are married or at least not alone. That give us 4-5 million that are very worried. Well, it is barely 1% of the population. A good 10% of us very worried. But a good number of Democrats never answer phone calls from unknown numbers. Those are just grannies in rural Nebraska or Iowa that answer the phone. They have nothing better to do. Or it could be the pharmacy telling them the price of insulin went up, do you still want it?

So the people directly affected are not polled. They are just over 1% of the population.

[Tyrannical]

Attacking Teslas in 'protest' seems really dumb from a liability standpoint. If responsibility could be traced back to some 'organization', donors to said organization could be on the hook for damages. Which could be in the billions when stock price drop is considered.

[JimC]

Attacking Teslas in 'protest' seems really dumb from a liability standpoint. If responsibility could be traced back to some 'organization', donors to said organization could be on the hook for damages. Which could be in the billions when stock price drop is considered.

I'm not sure that legal move would be possible. I'm against the Tesla destructions for two reasons; it is a waste of a bit of clever technology, and it tends to produce both some sympathy for Musk, and a perception that the movement against Trump is one of irrational violence, even though the perpetrators are a tiny minority.

[Tero]

My posts at the other forum (too long for Bluesky):
Tens of millions of seniors (see the link) were conned by Trump. Who they had for 2017-2020. Why would he not do the same wrecking of cabinets/departments he did in 2017?

I can sort of answer that myself. Not from my own brain, but seniors I know. They have memory problems. Short term memory (psychology) has started to go. But I will define a term: shortish memory. Depending on the individual, it is somewhere in the 1-3 year range. For politics, they remember this unimportant stuff that came to their phone about Biden. And they vagueley remember Covid. Those memories will fluctuate wildly, covid. But they do not remember 2020 well when they come to the 2024 election. They remember most vividly the last two years of Biden. So they have completely forgotten the conman Trump. And it's masses of foreigners coming over the border, a good 50% of them rapists and Venezuelan gang members and tattoos! The MAGA people have the tattoos. The ones over 65 and voting (largely Republicans, many Democrats choose to live their lives and interact with family and forget poltics except for that one November week) only captured fear in the assessment of our future. And that someone else (illegals!) was taking our Social Security under Biden. Better to vote Trump, then.

https://www.threads.net/@esa55jarvi/pos ... JEZthtfKFw

Also from my experience: seniors that never got the hang of smart phones nevertheless catch a lot of social media. Almost all that I know use an iPad. A very small number have switched to Kindles for books.

[Tero]

Mike Johnson on grindr and gay?
theclaudestaples
16h
Mike Johnson being gay actually makes the accountability software with his son make sense. “Dad can’t be gay, I’ve seen his search history!”

covie_93
7h
Guys stop, mike johnson is not on grindr, he meets his gay lover at church like every other self-respecting gay evangelical Christian man!

lyleleander
03/18/25
You really think that musk is gay? I can absolutely buy JD Vance and Mike Johnson for sure, but I don’t see it with Musk.

covie_93
03/07/25
lindsey graham, tim scott and josh hawley are going to have a hard time getting into the Pentagon if hegseth plans to ban all things gay.

[Tero]

Montana (new) senator: it's just a little remodeling. We will be fine.

[Sean Hayden]

[Tero]

[macdoc]

wow out riding all day and this happens

[JimC]

As admirable as the protests are, they will not change the political trajectory of the Trump administration. Courts may snipe around the edges, but the only thing that could actually alter economic decisions of the Whitehouse would be pressure from the big end of town if they see their wealth in jeopardy...

[Woodbutcher]

As admirable as the protests are, they will not change the political trajectory of the Trump administration. Courts may snipe around the edges, but the only thing that could actually alter economic decisions of the Whitehouse would be pressure from the big end of town if they see their wealth in jeopardy...

I do not think that the Republican party gives a shit about the ordinary people supporting it. They vote along the party lines, not according to what is best for their constituents.

[Tero]

Foreign aid was just gay rights and condoms and those awful vaccines. They saved Africa from autism!

"The Trump administration has now dismantled two key institutions of American soft power: the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. On March 28 the administration announced that it would be reducing the staff at U.S.A.I.D., the main agency for distributing foreign aid, to about 15 positions — down from the roughly 10,000 people it employed before Donald Trump returned to the White House. In January, the administration stopped $239 million in congressional appropriations for the N.E.D., a largely government-funded nonprofit with a mission of advancing democratic change."

"To understand why American soft power became so politically vulnerable, it helps to understand the damage progressives did to its broad legitimacy over the past decade and a half. They did this by implicating soft-power institutions in domestic political controversies, especially on issues of sexual politics. They conflated American interests overseas with progressive priorities, using taxpayer money to advance a set of claims over which Americans strongly disagree."

"Much of the right’s changing attitude toward institutions like U.S.A.I.D. can be traced to 2011, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech announcing that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” On the same day, the Obama administration issued a memo directing that all foreign aid and diplomacy be conducted in a way that promotes and protects the human rights of L.G.B.T. people."
"For conservatives, nothing symbolized this short-circuiting of debate so much as the decision to fly rainbow flags at U.S. embassies during Pride month. This practice, which began in 2011 during Barack Obama’s presidency, suggested that America’s formidable foreign-policy apparatus was being employed to support gay rights when, for example, 45 percent of the country opposed gay marriage.

"Whatever Cold War-era fondness conservatives still had for foreign aid quickly vanished. In 2011, after Ms. Clinton’s speech, Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, said that support for L.G.B.T. rights abroad was “not in America’s interests and not worth a dime of taxpayers’ money.” He promised to zero out foreign aid if he were to become president. The 2012 G.O.P. platform called for “limiting foreign aid” while faulting the Obama administration for attempting to promote “the homosexual rights agenda” overseas."

"Once foreign aid was politicized, it started to look to conservatives less like a tool for advancing American interests abroad and more like a patronage network for the ideologically aligned. While the sums were often small, there was a cumulative effect: $70,884 in Ireland for a musical event celebrating diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, $32,000 in Peru for a comic “featuring an L.G.B.T.Q.+ hero to address social and mental health issues,” $19,808 in Montenegro for gay-straight alliance clubs. Fair or not, the overall impression was of a system designed to sustain a global network of progressive groups with taxpayer dollars.

"It is understandable that progressives have sought to use American soft power to advance their idea of freedom. But styling oneself as an apostle of freedom opposed only by the unenlightened is an invitation to ignore the verdicts of democracy. Any party that uses American power to promote a controversial idea of freedom invites backlash, at home and abroad."

NYT
Matthew Schmitz who is the editor of an online magazine titled "Compact."

The headline reads, "This Is Why Conservatives Turned Against Foreign Aid."

[Brian Peacock]

Who are these powerful progressives? I must admit American political terminology suffers from applying established terms with clear definitions to the wrong people or groups for the wrong reasons. The back-and-forth swinging of US politics hasn't been between progressives and conservatives but between classic liberals and neo-liberals - neither of which are progressive, both of which are conservative by established definintions. It's a similar case when the American media talk about 'the left' when referring to the Democrats.

The Trump gaggle are beyond both forms of liberalism - they're an elite prosecuting a war against other elites, which we can call feudal capitalism or Supercapitalism or, if we're being straightforward about it, fascism. The objective of fascism is securing power over and control of, well, everything for a self-selecting group of (usually wealthy) individuals who believe they have a natural or rightful supremacy over all other people, groups, organisations and institutions. Sound familiar?