There is literally no limit to how stupid, vicious and incompetent psychopaths like father of 13 (all by IVF) Musk, his front man DJT and their young, unprincipled anti-government hackers (on the payroll of the government) are. I went on to the Social Security website to download my 1099. In order to log in I needed an email sent to me with a security code. Here’s the email that came from ssa.gov:
Google says: you can’t trust a message from Social Security, proceed with caution, red flag, red flag!
Apparently you can pick up one of these MAGA hats in Greenland or Canada. God bless these United Shayyssssh.
Mary Trump posted this picture at the top of her piece called The Ongoing National Security Debacle. I have only one word to add to the caption of this picture worth thousands of words. Mary’s caption is fine, excellent, really.
Morons.
I have read several excellent pieces about this foul bit of ongoing fascist foreplay, the illegal, asshole use of a chat group, on personal phones, to plan and gloat about a secret military strike. Timothy Snyder’s analysis of the larger point of this group chat bullshit is brilliant. Heather Cox Richardson’s keeps to her very high standard of excellent, insightful reporting — if you only read one, her’s is the one to read. Robert Reich is on fire on the obvious, burning question of Where Are the fucking Democrats at this moment?
This kind of coverage (the three mentioned above, I haven’t read Mary’s yet) is a huge part of the fight we all need to participate in, now and not when we are done trembling about the lack of amenities at the eventual death camp many of us will be shoehorned into.
When you are up against Nazis you are fighting psychopaths, whatever spineless mainstream Democrats may say about the virtues of playing possum while the Nazis magically self-destruct because of their own hubris, irrationality, stupidity and incompetence. The very things that drive Nazis. The exact things we have to remain educated about, highlight and fight at every turn. At every fucking turn, my friends.
There are two different forms of anger, one saves your life, the other destroys it in the end. The life-saving form of anger has an evolutionary/survival purpose. Suddenly flooded with adrenaline, cortisol and who knows what other miracle substances, you explode in a show of threat to scare off something that is threatening you. This anger, when successful in keeping you safe, is followed by relief. The flight or fight chemicals in your bloodstream dissipate and you go about your business. There is another kind of anger that is extremely dangerous to our bodies, our lives and the lives of those around us. This shapeshifting anger lingers, keeps your body coursing with fight or flight chemicals, which do great harm over time. This kind of anger is always ready to leap out when enflamed, often is not aimed at an appropriate threat, can’t be calmed, does not dissipate when the threat is warded off because the threat, which is internal, is never gone.
Anger that makes someone back off when they are in your face and unable to control their aggravating emotional reaction is good anger, anger necessary for survival, it makes the immediate pain stop. It doesn’t need to stick around after it has done its job. Seedj and I have expressed this kind of anger regularly to each other, especially during these recent hellishly aggravating weeks, when we have stepped over some line in our mutual pain and frustration and angered each other. Anger is not easy, not pretty, not clean but it is sometimes necessary, and when it is, if understanding and reconciliation follow as soon as possible, no harm is done. You can learn valuable lessons from another person’s explanation of what made them angry, learn to do better. Anger is particularly common when personal stress is running high, and aggravated by external events in the larger world, where, at the moment, every corporation and institution appears to be lining up, and ponying up big bucks to Dear Leader, to fund the gold-plated, gloriously violent MAGA swastika revenge parade that America’s greediest, along with the stupidest, angriest and most violent, are all spoiling for.
The anger that kills is the building set of grievances that gather, linger and are endlessly swallowed after occasional bitter complaining, constant passive-aggression, or violence, achieving nothing to resolve any of the causes. This inchoate anger is the unresolvable, constantly recurring, self-fueling anger that creates every cripplingly painful health problem Dr. John Sarno talks about. It has no end, is tangled in a self-hatred and self-blame that can never be surmounted, so it also kills relationships, including the crucial one with the self.
I’m going to take a break from thinking about my vexing personal situation, worries about a suddenly intermittent ability to pass bloody urine since an unnecessary urethral surgery done by a master salesman so confident he felt no need to do a single pre-surgical test, to muse a bit about another dangerous psychopath everyone in the world knows, and a good percentage of the world hates.
Those who hate him, or course, suffer from a special mental illness his handlers have cooked up (a regurgitated version of [Dubya] Bush Derangement Syndrome from the pre-Obama era), so we can, fairly and honestly, consider him universally loved, perhaps even intergalactically so.
(Why should I be required to show more courage than Columbia University, ABC, Disney, Chuck Schumer, bumbling numbskull John Fetterman, the Republican-led Congress, various law firms the president has threatened? Only one reason, actually: not to obey a wannabe American Hitler and his stinking horde in advance, fighting fascism fucking 101, brothers and sisters. I know well how many of the dead the original Hitler caused to be slaughtered (full disclosure, I may have an ax to grind, dozens in my family were killed by Elon’s and Don’s Herr H.), his one small fault now reduced by many to merely hating Jews a little bit (and who doesn’t? [1]), though the well-documented history of his impressive mass murder score is being erased, possibly by Musk employee Big Balls himself, as I tap this keyboard)
Anyway, sorry for the distraction. I was going to show you a picture, which I display under the for now robust protections of free expression provided by the First Amendment, which may soon be banned, even criminalized as “domestic terrorism” by Elon “Free Speech” Musk, enemy of unelected bureaucrats, and Pam “Too Corrupt to Serve in Trump’s first term” Bondi. Here you go:
Now these two photos of the same man are equally handsome, a fair minded person might say. One wears makeup, had painful scalp reduction surgery (which caused him to violently assault his first wife, who’d suggested the plastic surgeon who left him in agony) and spends twice the average worker’s annual income every year in hair dressing to make himself look tall and tan and young and lovely as the Girl From Ipanema. The other, non-cosmetically enhanced head merely reflects the results of 78, going on 79, years of life’s inevitable changes.
We live in a culture of illusion/deception by advertising, with a focus on youthful beauty, and Trumpie is touted as a genius because he has played to this illusion/deception “like nobody’s ever seen.” Leave aside the well-known fact that the man is a compulsive liar. There are other ways to refer to someone who constantly spouts falsehoods (see — NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, Völkischer Beobachter). In the law there is a distinction between “puffery” — making exaggerated claims of one’s own power to intimidate an adversary that do not cross the line into outright lies — and making false statements under oath or as an officer of the court (all lawyers who appear before judges are considered officers of the court) which are punishable as perjury. I apologize, insincerely, for this perverse insistence on drawing logical and semantic lines in the sewage we are all ankle deep in during Musk/Trump 2.0 Triumph of Wanton Irrationality Crusade.
The entire billionaire funded reactionary right-wing project of the last several decades, now in full stinking flower, has been to destroy meaning, to nullify rationality itself. Our current age of irrationality makes actual dialogue or negotiation between political opponents impossible since an irrational argument, asserted loudly and repeatedly, is just as good, for purposes of swaying public opinion, as a detailed, fact-based one that logically and completely refutes the other based on a body of what was once called incontrovertible evidence. Today, these irrational monsters controvert and crowds cheer, it’s not a problem at all.
This “the only the reality is what we say it is” leaves only constant warfare between hated enemies, rather than the sometimes contentious policy debates integral to a functioning democracy. Nazis don’t want democracy, they want Nazism, duh. You are either a woke snowflake who hates everything the rightful oligarchs of America stand for, OR, a courageous and fearless patriot who wants to turn America back to the paradise it was before insane deep state regulations destroyed the ability of Robber Barons to make, and keep, unregulatable wealth and operate as they saw fit, for the benefit of themselves and their poorly paid virtual slaves alike.
I was hoping for something a bit more profound today, and frankly I’ve disappointed myself. It’s hard to get out of your own feelings about being injured, physically and psychically, by a master salesman psychopath by writing about another one we are all sickeningly familiar with, or in love with his carefully manufactured false image (those who do not suffer from the widespread plague of TDS). His image again, please:
This thin-skinned stable genius strongman was recently bitterly crying over an official portrait of his, hung somewhere in 2019, that shows him looking a bit fat, bloated, an unhealthy color more like the unretouched one above than the carefully beautiful John Boehner-toned one he projects every day (he bragged that he was prettier than Kamala Harris, you be the judge, carefully…). The portrait’s painter, according to the strongest, most secure man in the free world, is a hack who is losing her skills, a bitch, probably an abortionist, sick, dangerous, a deranged enemy lunatic pet-eating sickie who deliberately tried to humiliate the world’s most handsome man after making Obama look so much more handsome than she made him look. Or, perhaps she’s just a portraitist who faithfully painted what she saw.
What do I know? The best I can do is something like this self-pitying self portrait as a partially crucified Picasso with pissbag and stylish, crucifix-coordinated shorts.
[1] By the way, according to Hannah Arendt’s short, encyclopedic primer on the original Nazis, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin edition, 2006, p. 133), Hitler himself had a list of 340 Jews on his personal “don’t touch Moishe” list.
The vast majority of psychopaths, like the current acting administrator of the Social Security Administration, a formerly mid-level SSA dude named Dudek, may never have committed any kind of physical violence against anyone. He may display other marks of psychopathy, but, not to worry, the American Psychiatric Association does not even have a definition of this familiar personality type in DSM V. Here’s what this one boasted of recently on social media:
Dudek was a mid-level staffer at SSA until he won his position atop the agency by secretly cooperating with DOGE’s demands to review sensitive records after SSA’s head, Michelle King, stood in the way. “I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” he wrote on LinkedIn. source
Another apparently non-violent psychopath, this one a billionaire cabinet member purportedly vetted and duly confirmed on a narrow party-line vote, added this bit of clarification about the kerfuffle at Social Security and who is actually to blame for the confusion and possibility that for the first time since the social safety net’s creation, checks for seniors and the disabled will not arrive on time (back to Heather):
SSA oversees Social Security benefits for nearly 70 million people and, according to the agency, was expected to distribute about $1.6 trillion in benefits in 2025. For many people, that check is vital to survival. But billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick suggested that concerns about a stoppage in checks were overblown. He told billionaire podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya: “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. 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.”
Anyone with a problem with the behavior of a psychopath is just a whining, complaining bitch to be bitch slapped by the psychopath. I am very sensitive at the moment to the issue of psychopathy, having been recently “treated” by a top urologist, charming, reassuring and a master salesman, who, truthfully told me (the only true statement I heard from him, with the knowledge of hindsight) the “minimally invasive” surgery would tear tissue in my urethra, and it tore such tissue (as my pain and difficulty urinating, since the removal of a catheter and “leg bag” I wore for a week, confirmed).
Hours after the surgery he told me he’d have to do a TURP, the one he’d sold the “dilation” as a way to avoid (knowing my concern that a TURP at this point would almost certainly end my sex life), since the dilation clearly wasn’t the surgery indicated, as he saw instantly the first time he actually looked into my bladder with a cystoscope (during the unnecessary, urinary tract lacerating surgery I’d just endured). Psychopath and motherfucker both, this unaccountably unethical asshole (unless his procedure left me with a permanent, legally cognizable injury, the jury’s still out as my ability to urinate waxes and wanes).
The main hallmarks of a psychopath are steely determination, lack of regret, adeptness in gaining control over others, self promotion, acquisition, particularly of wealth and power over others, a driving need to be the un-contradictable final word on everything. They are often charming, always persuasive, attuned to the needs of others in order to exploit them, they make great salesmen. The bulk of the titans of corporate boardrooms, and most CEOs, are psychopaths. They seem to make great leaders because they are bold, fearless risk-takers and they project a supernatural level of cool self-confidence, which is comforting to subordinates.
Until their real nature is revealed. They have no concern for the well-being of others, no regret for anything they’ve done, and they maintain a righteous, vindictive rage, unabated, over years, even decades.
It’s hard to read the signs sometimes, since psychopaths are generally adept manipulators who will tell you exactly what you need to hear.
Even if the signs are as clear as this one, in the lobby of my psychopathic former urologist’s office. In fairness to him, his office is part of the nation’s largest network of corporately owned humane, caring, supportive, patient-centered urology practices in the United States. The Supreme Court-created corporate person is a psychopath since it is only obliged to make the most money for shareholders and minimize liability for harm it does in pursuit of profit by any means necessary. Though my sloppy former doctor is the top dog in his office, I guess the “boss” made him put the sign up, they probably have one in each of their hundreds, if not thousands, of compassionate healing centers nationwide.
Make no mistake, and you certainly don’t need me to remind you of this, life provides each one of us with steady doses of various kinds of pain. Today mine is mostly located in my urinary tract, aggravated by a coudé catheter placed after a surgery it seems unlikely I needed in the first place (with a second catheter inserted in an ER after 7 stressful hours straining to urinate the next evening after removing the first). It is day four of the catheter and piss bag, and I must say, it is uncomfortable, occasionally painful and a fucking drag in many different ways.
There are all kinds of pain. Every kind of pain is made worse by enflamed emotions. The realization that the pain we are suffering, the result of someone else’s thoughtlessness, is unnecessary, could have been easily prevented had we not misplaced our trust, is maybe the most tormenting thing we can learn about our pain. In the hours after leaving the ER the other night I was in a rage against the negligent, confident, smiling surgeon who’d done no tests, relying on tests done by a prior sociopath who had done no tests either, before forging ahead blindly with surgery under general anesthesia. I sincerely wanted to punch his lights out. This rage certainly made the physical pain I was experiencing much worse.
I have found, and I confirmed this again the other day, that sitting in a quiet place and writing out a schematic of what is going on, explaining it to yourself as simply and directly as you can, as if you were talking to a sympathetic friend, can give substantial relief from the emotional part of pain.
My initial angry writing was a torrent of what happened to me as a result of a ten minute surgery I spent 14 hours in the hospital for (4 of them in the ER correcting the painful condition I was left with), why it was all so gratuitous, and inexcusable, and disrespectful, and avoidable and sickening and fucked up. That menu of gristly details went on for a few pages. I then emailed my cousin, an expert in medical malpractice, and briefly laid out my case for a breach of the legal standard of care that a doctor, even in a soul-dead corporate medical culture like ours, owes to a patient. These writings gave me slight relief, to have the ugly details set out on paper.
It was the following day, when my anger had cooled slightly, along with the inflammation of my abused urinary tract, which had been torn by the “non-invasive” procedure (first do no harm), that I was able to distill the pain down to the principle of trust. Much of the pain I was feeling was about a violation of trust. What is trust, how do we know when we can trust somebody, what do we do when someone proves they can’t be trusted? Turning to these philosophical questions, illustrated with details of two lying, defensive, unethical doctors who blamed their patient for their own inattention to the patient’s best interest, reduced my anger by a substantial margin. I felt much better after writing this.
Writing that gave me a better frame to look at my current frustrating situation through. This same analysis can be applied to many things in our current world, where liars are frequently rewarded with great power and those who cling to the truth are seen as somehow weak and contemptible. We don’t need to make an explicit connection to a corrupt and threatening new status quo to consider the basic question, an important one for everyday life: how do we know when we can trust somebody?
I have to say, in passing, that a new detail installed by WordPress on a page they no longer support (this particular design), the automatic, intermittently undefeatable “group blocks,” makes editing almost impossible once you’ve gone on to the next paragraph. I will have to go over this again on my phone to make it more clear, and the thought of that extra step makes my irritated urethra clench a bit. What is it with these fucking tech bro motherfuckers, who know better than any of us what features we want suddenly disabled, what new inconveniences coders like Big Balls will insert into formerly useful apps to make us appreciate their dull genius even more than we already do? I see now that there are three dots that can be clicked on, in addition to the normal options for formatting, and one of the options in that second pulldown menu is “ungroup”, which allows editing, but it took me weeks to discover that fix of something that wasn’t broken before in any way (and the fix of their new ‘improvement’ doesn’t work every time, as it happens). Nazi fucks.
Anyway, my point here is to underscore how helpful it can be to sit and sift through aggravations, with as few distractions as possible, and by writing and clarifying, readjust your perspective. The expression of your point of view, and the knowledge that you have set it out plainly and understandably, provides that crucial feeling of being heard, if only by yourself. If you need to explain it to someone else, you have a link you can send them, and the confidence that they will grasp what is eating you and why it is reasonable that you are feeling in the hands of cannibals.
At the moment there’s no medication I can take for the discomfort and intermittent pain of having this irritating catheter in my body, strapped to a piss bag I’m constantly having to drain. There is a kind of self-healing in laying out the good reasons for my anger and considering how to protect myself from anything like this ever being done to me again, no matter how adept the smiling psychopath is in presenting it as my best and least invasive option for curing a medical ill.
I recommend it to you, my invisible friend, as an exercise that can go a long way in self-soothing. Once you get yourself into the habit, it becomes a fairly straightforward path to partial pain relief. In the context of severe pain, I have learned, partial relief is nothing to sneeze at. Whatever practice you can develop for calming the enflamed emotions that accompany all pain is helpful. Try writing for a few minutes the next time you can’t get the thought of smashing someone’s smug face out of your mind. If it reduces your pain by 30%, you can give yourself a gentle, loving pat on the back.
Once you realize a person is prone to lying, trust is often a self-destructive option. Until you see this pattern of untruthfulness clearly, the question of trusting or not trusting can be tricky. I think humans want to trust the people around them, this appears to be a default setting. We homo sapiens are a communal, if also often communally irrational, species, after all, and community is based on trust.
When you’re a helpless infant you have no choice but to trust the people taking care of you. This trust is rewarded if you’re nurtured with care. Trust can be shattered forever if you learn you’ve been continually pissed on by your caretakers and told to shut up and stop whining about a little rain falling on your head. Most of us have upbringings that fall somewhere in between. Knowing when to trust and when not to trust is often only learned by hard experience. We put our trust in somebody, in their expertise, and sometimes that trust is revealed to have been misguided. The question: how do we know in advance that we can trust someone?
We tend to trust people, I suppose I generalize from my own habit, who are relaxed, friendly, show a sense of humor, make the proper sympathetic facial expressions, and react reassuringly, when you express concerns. The obvious problem is that these are all the behaviors of the best conmen and almost all manipulators and compulsive liars.
I’m thinking about this because I had a consultation with a friendly, reassuring, good humored and very likeable urologist back in August. We left the office very impressed with him. He assured me that during the tests I was going to have two weeks later I’d be under comfortable “conscious sedation”. I was relieved to hear that since having devices shoved into your penis is not always comfortable, and is usually done without any palliative measures. The standard line is that most patients tolerate it. You wince a bit, maybe groan, at the insertion, and the rest is fairly tolerable. But I was glad to know I’d be sedated, the better to wince less, and maybe not have to grunt.
When I arrived for the tests, and asked about the conscious sedation, his nurse expressed frustration that he always tells his patients they will receive conscious sedation when his office NEVER gives conscious sedation, does not even have tranquilizers they can give patients. She said he probably thinks it makes his patients more relaxed. I didn’t need to convince her that learning, at the moment of your test, that the doctor lied to you is the opposite of relaxing. I endured a ninety minute ordeal with this gentle, determined nurse, as she tried, unsuccessfully to insert catheters into my urethra to drain my bladder for the test.
The doctor came in, sweaty and smiling, and asked how I was doing. I told him I was wondering what happened to my conscious sedation. He had a fit, denying he’d ever said that, essentially calling me a fucking liar. In that moment I knew I was done with this asshole, and managed to remain the adult in the room. I quickly calmed the angry baby down and got him back to business. He told me he wouldn’t do further tests, telling me my urethra was already irritated enough for one day.
Then he wrote a detailed report, which I got a copy of and which was sent to all of my doctors, not mentioning the unsuccessful catheterization, but stating “patient tolerated procedure well.” It then gave detailed findings of two tests this motherfucker never did. He billed Medicare for them, and I got bills and a statement from Medicare confirming the charges and what they paid. Medicare did not seem concerned about the fraud, it was virtually impossible to report it, even as determined as I was to.
My next urologist was also affable, smiling, quite chill, with a sense of humor and all the other indicators of a nice guy you could trust. He was openly horrified by the doctor’s false report I presented to him and suggested I contact HR at the place his unethical colleague worked. (No doctor is going to suggest a disciplinary complaint to the state licensing board). He did no tests, described a non-invasive surgery that should correct my urinary problem, I postponed the procedure once to have a fuller discussion of it. He gave me a detailed theory for why this procedure was better than the standard alternative, which I’d had years earlier, to great life changing effect. I had the procedure Thursday and left the hospital with a catheter and piss bag on my leg, as is common after this kind of surgery.
There was a complication when I removed the catheter the next day as instructed. I was unable to urinate at all. After 4 hours with a full bladder, and the constant urge to urinate, I wound up in the ER where I was “fast tracked” and it only took another 3 hours to have the painful urgency to piss out 600 ml of urine relieved by a new catheter.
I was sore, irritated and in need of advice afterwards and called the number the urologist had smilingly touted as a 24/7 doctor on call, no worries. I left increasingly agitated messages. Five messages and five hours later, at 2:45 a.m., I got a call from a bot, instructing me to go to an ER and have the ER doctor contact their on-call doctor.
I called again when I woke up and got a fairly quick call back from the surgeon himself. He sounded indignant to have been defamed the way I’d spoken of him in my increasingly agitated messages. He told me I had a poor recollection of our detailed conversations prior to the surgery. I was in a pissing contest with a skunk, only my piss was dribbling slowly into a leg bag. I asked him why he hadn’t done any pre-surgical tests before doing what seems, at the moment, and in light of what he told me after an unnecessary surgery. He was able to see with the scope that, contrary to his prior test-free opinion, there was no scarring from the previous procedure and that I’d likely need the original procedure repeated soon in any case. ) He told me he had the notes of recent tests from my previous urologist, the tissue of lies he had attached to my file in the hospital. He made numerous other excuses and told me how busy he was doing Saturday surgeries at another hospital. I sensed there was not a trace of his winning smile on his face as he defended himself and his perfect recollection.
So, quite naturally, as an irritating drip of urine intermittently leaks through the painfully re-inserted catheter into the leg bag, I am musing about trust, when to trust, who to trust, if you can ever trust someone who is employed by a demanding bottom-line driven psychopath, which is what every corporation is. After all, this guy is the director of his clinic, part of a chain across the US, the largest corporate provider of high quality, infallible, humane, patient-centered urologic care. You can read all about it on their fucking website.
Or just listen to their compassionate on-call doctor, who phones you personally at 2:48 a.m., a mere five hours after your first of five distress calls.
I wrote this last night, before several members of the opposition party folded and made a catastrophic deal with, do not flinch from this word, read history, American Nazis.
This is the insane, erratic, enraged, two year-old, whose opposition leader apparently has no memory, courage, sense, dignity or access to the internet. The only man capable of making a very stable genius, who is actually a very unstable, stupid person, look like the artist of the deal.
Criticized? Read this Chuck, you stupid motherfucker (and forward it to Gillebrant and the other invertebrates who voted with you). This is the last time Trump shut down the government, in his previous temper tantrum showdown with sick, dangerous enemies. Wikipedia, jackass.
The United States federal government shutdown from midnight EST on December 22, 2018, until February 9, 2019 (35 days) was the longest government shutdown in US history[1][2] and the second[a] and final federal government shutdown involving furloughs during the first presidency of Donald Trump. It occurred when the 115th Congress and Trump could not agree on an appropriations bill to fund the operations of the federal government for the 2019 fiscal year, or a temporary continuing resolution that would extend the deadline for passing a bill. The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal departments or agencies from conducting non-essential operations without appropriations legislation in place. As a result, nine executive departments with around 800,000 employees had to shut down partially or in full, affecting about one-fourth of government activities and causing employees to be furloughed or required to work without being paid.[3] The Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown cost the American economy at least $11 billion USD, excluding indirect costs that were difficult to quantify.[4]
The shutdown stemmed from an impasse over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in federal funds for a U.S.–Mexico border wall.[5][6][7] In December 2018, the Senate unanimously passed an appropriations bill without wall funding, and the bill appeared likely to be approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Trump. After Trump faced heavy criticism from some right-wing media outlets and pundits for appearing to back down on his campaign promise to “build the wall“, he announced that he would not sign any appropriations bill that did not fund its construction. As a result, the House passed a stopgap bill with funding for the wall, but it was blocked in the Senate by the threat of a Democratic filibuster.[8]
In January 2019, representatives elected in the November 2018 election took office, giving the Democrats a majority in the House. The House immediately voted to approve the appropriations bill that had previously passed the Senate unanimously (which included no funding for the wall). For several weeks, Trump continued to maintain that he would veto any bill that did not fund an entire border wall, and Republican Senate Majority LeaderMitch McConnell blocked the Senate from considering any appropriations legislation that Trump would not support, including the bill that had previously passed.[9][10] Democrats and some Republicans opposed the shutdown and passed multiple bills to reopen the government, arguing that the government shutdown amounted to taking civil servants “hostage” and that negotiations could only begin once the government was reopened.[11][12][13][14]
On January 25, 2019, Trump agreed to endorse a stopgap bill to reopen the government for three weeks up until February 15 to allow for negotiations to take place to approve an appropriations bill that both parties could agree on.[15] However, Trump reiterated his demand for the border wall funding and said that he would shut down the government again or declare a national emergency and use military funding to build the wall if Congress did not appropriate the funds by February 15.[15][16]
Trump’s approval rating dropped during the shutdown.[17][18] A majority of Americans opposed exploitation of the shutdown as a negotiating strategy and held Trump responsible for the shutdown: A CBS News poll found that 71% of Americans considered the border wall “not worth the shutdown”[19] and a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 53% of Americans blamed Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, compared to 34% who blamed Democrats and 10% who blamed both parties.[20]
On February 15, 2019, Trump declared a national emergency to fund the wall and bypass Congress, after being unsatisfied with a bipartisan border bill that had passed the House and the Senate a day before.[21]
Musk ought to name the first vernichtungslager after you, Schumer, you pathetic unwitting, democracy betraying, weak, easily played, collaborator motherfucker. Nice work, asshole, now do the Roman salute.
The power to create federal agencies resides exclusively in Congress. Leaders of these agencies must be confirmed by Congress, after FBI vetting, conflict of interest checks and public hearings. The power of appropriating tax dollars and spending them is exclusive to Congress. Congress holds the power of the purse. Yet Trump creates a fake agency, cutely named DOGE, appoints an unelected, unvetted billionaire disrupter, with multiple conflicts of interest and many investigations into his shady business practices, experienced only in slashing his workforce, spreading racism (“free speech”), setting a modern record for buying access to power ($270,000,000 and growing) and creating chaos to head the “agency”. The president’s lawyers deny in a sworn statement to the court that this unhinged maniac is in charge, as he illegally mass fires government workers, closes agencies, withholds funds Congress has voted to disburse.
Everyone acts as though this clear violation of multiple laws, and the constitution itself, is all perfectly fine, or at least a matter for the courts to sort out. The NY Times, and virtually everyone else, refers to this fake agency as The Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) as though it’s an actual, legally created government department with unlimited power over every other department. It’s all perfectly normal, by the looks of it, insane and arbitrary as it also clearly is.
A group of reactionary billionaires, in their most recent manifesto, Project 2025, begs to differ with the constitutional order. They regard efficient, elected government as “majoritarian tyranny” that persecutes the billionaire class. They are persecuted by regulations on how they may treat their workers, how much pollution their factories can emit, how safe their products must be. So they prefer an all-powerful CEO with the power to make all these persecutions vanish.
They played the long game, orchestrating the capture of the Supreme Court, achieving a 6-3 majority of ideological purists, “Originalists”, from a far-right judicial fraternity called the Federalist Society, funded the by the same folks who fund the Heritage Foundation and all other reactionary “think tanks”. This majority ruled that unlimited, dark money is political speech (for corporations and the super wealthy, anyway), that racist voter suppression laws and racial gerrymandering are fine unless made with explicit racist intent, announced explicitly during the hearings for the law in question, that anti-bribery laws only apply in certain specific scenarios, that government scientists don’t get the last word on scientific decisions, white Christian legislators and judges do, that the president may sometimes have to commit criminal acts in the course of his core duties (how about a hypothetical there, boys?) and that these criminal acts may not ever be prosecuted. They added a cherry to this shit sundae (which also, of course, abandons the fate of raped, pregnant girls and women to their individual state legislatures) by ruling that no presidential pardon, even if sold outright in public, may ever be questioned in court.
Granted, MAGA is absolutely a cult and Trump has been vetting it for loyalty with extreme zealousness since his loss in 2020. The Republican party has rid itself of any elected officials who defy the cult leader. They are as spineless, and infinitely flexible in their views, as they are punitive and driven by a thirst for vengeance. But where is the opposition party? Outside of a small handful of elected Democrats, and a group of Democratic attorneys general, there is barely a peep from the corporate Democratic leadership. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx) is great, we hear from Jamie Raskin (D-Md), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) but rarely a murmur from anyone else.
How is it that DOGE is not denounced daily as an illegal “agency”? It was not created by Congress, it was pulled out of Charles Koch’s crusty nonagenarian ass. How is the illegal shuttering of USAID, the decimation of Medicaid, the mass firing of IRS, Veterans Affairs (thanks for your service, assholes) Department of Education civil servants, and thousands of others, just subject matter for law suits? How is a hopped up, unelected oligarch’s idiotic refrain of ridding us of “unelected bureaucrats”, not routinely and regularly slapped down as the simpleminded self-contradictng bullshit that it is?
I understand that rage is not amenable to reason. Strong emotion beats a beautifully articulated logical argument in the court of public opinion, but still — how about a little fucking truth and clarity once in a while?
Has America really succumbed to an irrational narrative? This narrative is perpetrated by corporate media, for profit. There are two sides to every story, and almost half of Americans polled approve of the insane two year-old whose vocabulary has shrunk to the level of an eight year old. Fine people in the Nazi party (führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft, sure, but don’t call us Nazis, those are Roman salutes!) and among those enemies the Nazis target. False nuance swallows a very clear narrative: one side relies on constant lies, the stoking of rage and flagrant violations of law to fire up their angry base, the other side believes good policies, fairness in law enforcement and acknowledged equality and respect for human dignity win the day among their reasonable supporters (and wealthy/corporate donor base).
In the battle between lies and truth, there is no middle ground. What the fuck, America? The truth ain’t that threatening, call out the lies every single time, put the proof on the table. Trump failed to rig the 2020 election and incited a riot to culminate a seven tentacled conspiracy to cling to power. It appears he did a much better job in 2024, the first ever election in the Trump era that was not “rigged”. His “mandate” is the narrowest in decades, his approval rating, at this point in his presidency, the lowest on record (breaking his own record from 2017). Plus, he’s clearly insane. What the fuck, America?
Here’s what the commander-in-chief told the crowd at The Ellipse on January 6th, right before sending them off to fight like hell or they won’t have a country anymore.
Fascism is always based on lies. It cannot function without a lying counter narrative contradicting what everybody is able to see, hear and smell with their own senses.That this shameless enraged 2-year-old is a master of lying temper tantrums, should not distract anybody from his essential nature. Note the simplistic elegance of this particular lie:
The 2020 election was stolen, the proof of the rigged election was covered up by a corrupt bipartisan coalition of sick and insane haters, therefore, anything we need to do now is fully justified in the eyes of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Now go hang that traitor, Mike Pence!
I will try to post an infamous MAGA lie here every couple of days, until this insane fucker self-destructs, or I am arrested in the middle of the night and sent to a dark site somewhere.
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