Let them fight, then we can clean up the survivors…
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My wife was just looking at her phone laughing, now what?
This must be where trump gets his ideas.
They have the solution to the Middle East crisis, it involves Greenland.
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Gotta grab the good news when we can…
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Again.
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Wow, that’s a tough situation. We should probably just leave him in Italy for a while so he can work that out properly. If they covered him in tar and rolled him around in a pile of feathers, could he replace the duck? Let’s find out.
Yeah, I know trump will probably use his influence to keep Jr out of trouble, assuming he can remember who Jr is long enough. But it’s okay, I doubt this Jr owns a laptop (or even knows how to turn one on) so he’s obviously above reproach.
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Look, that duck was an antifa agent seen collaborating with Hunter Biden to use Hillary’s illegal email servers to cover up Benghazi and the Vince Foster thing so her and George Soros can take all our guns and sell them to the lizard people and Russians and…wait…I’m getting word now that the Russians are our friends and the lizard people have built a shrine to the orange one. They are now being removed from this round of “conservative mad libs to make libs mad.” We’ll be back with an update to our latest conspiracy.
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Speaking of Jr.
Me thinks he doesn’t know what a landslide is or the difference in what Musk is being allowed to do vs. his point about Soros.
But, can you imagine the outrage if Soros was allowed unlimited access to government computers and payment systems?
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I hate that the second half of that tweet is 100% accurate (well, other than the “landslide” part). Trump and his minions are indeed doing exactly what they said they would do. Despite all the people who voted for Trump saying, “oh that’s just him being provocative, he’d never do that”, they are getting exactly what they voted for.
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At this point, I am wondering if we start a separate thread “The goddamn Musk Administration” or maybe just “It’s. A. Coup.”
This is what dictatorship looks like
We’re now in a coup
Feb 05, 2025
Friends,
It’s a coup.
As Trump talks about taking over Gaza (“beautiful shoreline”), Greenland (“great minerals”), Panama (“very strategic”), and making Canada the 51st state, the media has gone ape-shite wild.
Meanwhile, Trump’s goons are taking over the federal government without congressional authority and very little public awareness.
They’re using two techniques.
The first is to physically take over an agency or department.
Consider USAID. Elon Musk (now a “special government employee”) calls it a “criminal organization” that needs to “die” and brags about feeding it “into the wood chipper.”
Which is what he and his tech goons have done — dismantling the work of the 10,000-person, $40 billion foreign-assistance agency, along with the thousands of people in nonprofits and other groups that work with it.
The irony of the richest man in the world almost single-handedly destroying an agency designed to help the world’s poor, so that the U.S. federal budget has more room for another giant tax cut for the richest man in the world and his pals, should not be lost on anyone.
Yesterday, all of USAID’s Washington facilities were closed. Nearly all USAID’s 10,000 employees have been put on administrative as of Saturday. Staff working around the world have been ordered to return home within 30 days.
“Thank you for your service,” is the last message on USAID’s website, which for days was offline.
Make no mistake: The takeover and dismantling of USAID is a test case for whether Musk and the Trump regime can destroy a part of government without legal or political resistance.
So far, the answer seems to be yes.
Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune says he “doesn’t believe” the Trump administration is closing an agency without congressional approval, but that it is rather reviewing how the agency is spending money.
Thune is either a fool or a knave.
The second technique being used by Musk and his tech goons is to gain access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government, and alter it — writing new code for programs that control more than 20 percent of the U.S. economy, including Social Security benefits and veterans’ pay.
Musk says he’ll be shutting down some Treasury payments in an effort to root out “corruption and waste.” That is, whatever Musk considers corruption and waste.
What’s next? Will Trump, Musk, and Musk’s tech goons take over, or stop funding, the Labor Department? (My sources there tell me Department of Labor workers have been ordered to give Musk’s DOGE access to anything they want — or risk termination.)
I don’t know, but I do know that nothing right now seems to be stopping them.
The Republican-controlled Congress has essentially surrendered Congress’s powers, including the power of the purse (it has already surrendered its powers over tariffs and foreign policy). There’s not much of a role for Congress left.
This afternoon, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tried to subpoena Musk, but Republicans called a procedural vote without notice so the Dems wouldn’t get there on time. Here’s Congressman Ro Khanna’s account, followed by Musk’s response.
My friends, this is no longer about Democrats versus Republicans, left versus right, liberals versus conservatives.
The choice right now is democracy or dictatorship (or if you’d rather use the term fascism, go right ahead). And we are sliding faster than I ever thought possible into the latter.
Everyone must choose which side they’re on. Now.
More on this to come.
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Some congressional shitbags and other right wing talking head shitbags were on CNN last night hand-waving this away by saying, “why should there be people working in government who aren’t aligned with Trump’s agenda?” and saying how “generous” these buyout offers are. They can just take an 8 month vacation on the American taxpayers’ dime! What a mensch that Trump guy is! (Never mind this is the complete opposite of fiscal responsibility, but whatever…)
This completely misses the point that non-political employees of the government aren’t there to “enact the President’s agenda”. They are there to do work for the benefit of the people of the country. The whole point is these aren’t supposed to be partisan positions. I’m sure they all know this intellectually, they just don’t have the courage or integity to admit that they don’t care as long as they get theirs.
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I’d like to know what political agenda is relevant to IT that doesn’t involve fascism.
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Right? The only “agenda” for IT should be keeping the computers and networks online.
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Which is what he and his tech goons have done — dismantling the work of the 10,000-person, $40 billion foreign-assistance agency, along with the thousands of people in nonprofits and other groups that work with it.
The irony of the richest man in the world almost single-handedly destroying an agency designed to help the world’s poor, so that the U.S. federal budget has more room for another giant tax cut for the richest man in the world and his pals, should not be lost on anyone.
That’s one of the particularly infuriating things about all this so-called “efficiency” effort. The numbers they are talking “saving” about are essentialy rounding errors in the nearly $2 trillion dollar federal budget. It’s all ticky-tack bullshit meant to give an appearance to the know-nothings that they are getting shit done when they really aren’t doing anything to save taxpayer dollars. Just to make more gaps for them to grow their profits.
I will say this statement from Reich just over a month ago hasn’t aged particularly well:
President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power is unnerving but America will not turn into a dictatorship overnight — or in four years. Even the most determined strongmen face internal hurdles, from the bureaucracy to the media and the courts. It took Erdoğan well over a decade to fully consolidate his power. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Law and Justice Party needed years to erode democratic norms and fortify their grip on state institutions.
Because it sure seems like Trump and his minions are running completely unchecked right now. Every Trump appointee has been confirmed to a cabinet role and are already doing everything they can to destroy the agencies they represent. Trump himself is shitting out a deluge of executive orders on a daily basis. Elon Musk is doing whatever he wants with the government computers completely unchecked. There’s actions working their way through the courts, but I don’t expect anything substantive to happen here. After all, Trump has already shown a willingness to simply ignore any laws he doesn’t like, and Republicans in Congress are too beholden to Trump to ever think about impeachment. SCOTUS has already said that whatever Trump does is legal even if it isn’t.
I just don’t even know how we ever get out of this hole we’re digging ourselves into.
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Trump’s new ban on trans athletes is latest attack on transgender policies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/02/05/transgender-students-trump-executive-order/
Whew! The nation is now safe from the threat posed by the 10 NCAA trans athletes out of 500,000 women.
He’s really focused on things that heavily impact the average American family. This will definitely lower the price of eggs!
And will trans guys will be allowed to compete in the women’s category?
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Here is a long list of words (e.g. black and latinx, community diversity, community equity, cultural differences, cultural heritage, culturally responsive, disabilities… ) and (egads) a flow-chart, that will get your paper flagged at the trumpy NSF
The List of Trump’s Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF
It’s fascism, plain and simple.
By Matt Novak Published February 5, 2025 | Comments (46)
Every federal agency in the U.S. is currently trying to figure out how to purge forbidden words from documents posted online, in a desperate attempt to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order to purge “DEI” from every facet of American life. And nowhere is that effort more bizarre than the National Science Foundation, which is currently combing through websites and research papers for a long list of words that include “female,” “disability,” and “LGBT,” among a host of others.
…
(once i had an NSF grant … good people back then. really cared about keeping Science as a mostly positive social endeavor; now reduced to this Orwellian nightmare @#$!!)
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Yes, the ruling is good news, but these assholes will stop at nothing. Now they’re citing British case law from 1608 that they somehow are claiming is more relevant than the 14th amendment:
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/04/house-republicans-trump-birthright-citizenship
The scary thing is that it’s hard to be confident that a majority of the current Supreme Court Justices wouldn’t be swayed by this kind of bullshit.
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You know, I do understand that. My sanity is hanging by a thread and I am clinging to any bit of hope I can find.
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