It also didn’t take long for the aftermath to become racially charged, either.
As it turns out, the folks most impacted by hurricanes and other weather events (e.g. flooding) are people of color. So, sending FEMA late to these sorts of things just reeks of malicious compliance.
“Fox and Frenemies” it is then.
I was gonna say. Now we get to add anti-war protesting to an already lengthy list of complaints. This is going to get huge.
You want to protest the war? We have a whole anti-trump protest movement already warmed up and ready to go. C’mon in.
Well this is pretty par for the course with TACO,
Indeed it is, and I think we’re gonna see it get worse. Trump is an abusive parent/partner. There’s no “doing the right thing”, merely “make sure everyone else is a better target.” Yesterday it was Hegseth, today it’s Gabbard. Tomorrow… who knows?
Where it gets really interesting is that this behavior can create a perverse incentive for his team to undermine one another.
$0.02: good people know enough to not take the job, let alone run for it. It’s expensive to run for office, doesn’t pay enough, eats up your life, you’re constantly advertising to stay employed, and your co-workers are all politicians. It’s very much a “I offer myself as tribute” kind of a situation, even for extraordinary people.
Meanwhile, a corrupt person knows that it’s worth all the trouble if you convert political power into (illegal) money.
Honestly, short of some miracle undoing this whole mess, this was a flavor of outcome I was quietly hoping for. At some point, politicians are going to realize - much like the president’s base - that they’re going to lose power unless they mount some kind of opposition. For the very worst ones out there, power is kind of their whole bag. Take it away and they get very angry; they may even do something about it. It’s kind of the tacit driving force behind any “checks and balances” scheme: power-hungry bastards trying to out-power-hungry-bastard each other. In a gross way, we kind of depend on it.
Why not both?
well done steaks
It’s like he’s good a being a monster in every capacity possible. Probably asks for the ketchup bottle at 4-star dining while he’s at it.
I’m terrified that DeSantis could be next.
To me, the play here is to cock-block any possibility of their base exercising empathy for others. The fact that they have escalated beyond cries of “fake news” to straight up lies, is chilling.
Wait until someone tells him what “Born in the USA” and “Born to Run” are really about.
On the one hand, the shock and horror that people experience when their government goes hard on bigotry, demands some kind of retreat to psychological safety. On the other, the above is not the kind of copium one should reach for. What’s sad is that, as a group, they probably had the resources to actually do something useful to help themselves, rather than offer mutual support to ignore all the warning signs.
Possibly the grossest thing about all this, is how the RNC wasted no time trying to turn this into something it’s not.
Those who resort to violence to undermine our state and nation must be held accountable
While in principle I agree, nobody was hurt. That’s because this was arson, not assault.
Today, we see the same dangerous tendencies play out in new forms—attempts to suppress free speech, silence dissent, and use fear to control the political narrative.
Ironic, no? Nevermind the whataboutism regarding the old DNC and GOP roles back in the early 20th.
Maybe, but as I recall, it was a Civil Rights protest. I had to look it up. Back in 1963:
https://sandersinstitute.org/event/bernie-sanders-arrest-at-chicago-civil-rights-protest
Edit: maybe the most based human being alive at this point.
Once you’ve got that kind of money, I’m sure you have millions squirreled away here and there.
That’s kind of right. He likely has liquid funds stuffed away in all kinds of places, possibly in different currencies on different continents. The only way to put someone like this in the poorhouse is to bankrupt every single one of his investments, while simultaneously freezing all his funds internationally.
From a finance perspective, a billionaire is a few orders of magnitude beyond “escape velocity” from ever being poor. I think most of us would need a few tens-of-millions USD in cash to even consider achieving such a thing.
Another way to look at it is that the billions in “net worth” he has accumulated are just ablative armor for real spendable wealth. Consider the move he made with Twitter: the objective was controlling the platform and discourse on it, full stop. Losing tens of billions didn’t matter - it wasn’t real money in the first place (mostly stock) and wasn’t spendable in the conventional sense. DOGE is a similar play in that the kinds of unfair advantages being gained are worth at least what he’s losing.
Thank you. I’m wishing the same for myself and my fellow not-pants-on-head-crazy people in this madhouse.
Yours,
Same. I’ve got a real bad feeling about this.
I dumped that into ChatGPT to figure out what that would mean:
“Gold-progressing”: If “oro-” means gold, then “orogressive” could describe something advancing toward wealth, golden standards, or prosperity.
“Mountain-moving” or “Mountain-progressing”: If we go with the geological meaning, “orogressive” could mean progressing through or overcoming mountains—maybe symbolizing overcoming big challenges.
“Speech-advancing”: If “oro-” is tied to oral communication, “orogressive” might mean someone who is progressive in speech, rhetoric, or persuasion.
Honestly, all of those are ironically far more aspirational than “progressive”. I give it 4/5 stars for your newly-minted neologism.
Not sure where you’re from, but we have some problems that stand in the way of coordinating any kind of resistance. At least, not proactively.
In short: we have no living memory of domestic war, famine, epidemic, or wholesale financial hardship lasting longer than a few years. We’ve had tastes of those things, but they always effect people disproportionately, usually along class lines. So being proactive by taking up arms, or preparing for economic catastrophe, is literally unthinkable for most.
Meanwhile, the usual kind of political corruption that we’re accustomed to just came to an end, and is changing shape before our very eyes. Nobody knows what to do with that, yet.
They’re literally incapable of imagining anything else. Otherwise, we’d have radically different outcomes from all this.