it is the nature of personalist authoritarian regimes. Anything that presents them with information or outcomes that don’t serve the leaders goals gets turned in to an enemy, even if it’s the dumbest strategic choice possible.

They have an incredibly favorable Supreme Court, and rather than working with it to consolidate power, they are throwing rocks at it for not letting them do what ever they want.

It’s a pattern across a lot of dysfunctional organizations, when a leader doesn’t accept “not possible” for an answer. Doesn’t care about the dissent presented by subordinates and dismisses it as disloyalty. If you don’t want to get fired, you just go along with the boss and never present him with the reality.

The real messes occur when this kind of behavior scales. When the subordinates of the leader start doing the same to their own subordinates. When people start lying to their superiors about what is happening because they know the boss doesn’t want bad news or to be told their idea didn’t work. You get a game of telephone where information is distorted as it moves up the chain.

I think cases like this are a great look at the internal thought process of trumps team. Like, this isn’t them developing a masterful plan and executing on it. This is the first fucking idea that someone in the room proposed after a few drinks.

Like, they don’t understand the laws they’re bumping in to, or even if someone understands it, they’re pretending they don’t so they can tell the boss that they have a plan to make the thing happen. It’s trumps method of running an organization failing because the incentive structure is to tell the boss you can get him what he wants, even if what he wants isn’t possible. So they keep wasting their time and resources chasing stupid plans.

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It’s sitting right there DNC, a path to a land slide victory, might piss your friends at the yacht club … but it’s the path to victory.

Because he wants to do a huge tax cut, or even get rid of income tax outright, and he needs revenue to replace that.

I almost never see malt vinegar in the US unless it’s at a UK themed restaurant.

Like, it’s not really much of a thing in US food. Maybe as like a source product for distilled vinegar? But I think that’s mostly made from corn not malted barley. Honestly I see imitation “balsamic” or red wine vinegar way more often than malt

At least with eggs and chicken, it’s mostly a collapse of the industrial farming system. This outbreak of bird flue has been going on since 2022 and has yet to really be contained or dealt with. Nearly 165 million chickens have died from H5N1 or been culled to slow the spread in the past 3 years. There have been 14 facilities with a million or more chickens totally wiped out since the start of the year.

Weirdly, it’s had much less effect on “pasture raised” egg prices. Almost like the disease is a lot less of a problem if the chickens aren’t stressed and crammed shoulder to shoulder for easy transmission.

Huh, funny, isn’t that. Almost like Israel’s leadership was lying through it’s teeth.

He can say what ever he wants, apparently, but he has to run it by a court to actually prosecute people, and we’ve already seen that the courts are not just giving him the outcomes he wants.

Hell, even the Supreme Court, as stacked as it is, isn’t just rolling over for him.

The question is what happens when he continues to just ignore court orders and rulings. Will he be held in contempt? Will there be actions to enforce the decisions of the courts?

That’s the actual question at stake at this point

Their monetary losses are insubstantial compared to the gains in power they will receive from further weakening the influence and power of the average person.

If there is anything to be learned from the past few weeks, it’s that federal employees can just ignore these kinds of emails, the courts have repeatedly put holds on such orders

That they’re admitting they fucked up in any way other than “ we should have run a primary” or the BS excuse of “we weren’t mean enough to trans people” is news in it’s own right.

They shouldn’t have listed to the consultants who told them to run a middle ground safe campaign.

They really are just ghouls. Like? What? Forcing people to use a proprietary for profit software? Why?! How much has turbo tax payed them?!

Zelenskyy has pulled off an incredible diplomatic move. He’s illustrating to the public both at home and abroad, that Ukraine is an independent country and he’s calling trump’s bluff.

Trump has been bluffing this whole time. Leaning on this idea that he can just pull the plug on aid to Ukraine, on this idea of the unitary executive. The thing is, Ukraine is still a popular cause in America, both with in government institutions and the public, despite the efforts of so many. Trump’s bully pulpit is not so strong as to change that with a stroke of a pen.

Now, trump can attempt to unilaterally revoke aid, but that will run in to real legal road blocks and create bipartisan public dissent, thus undermining the fiction of the unitary executive. Or he can change his tone, real fucking fast, and claim he always had the intention to support Ukraine, his supporters will buy it, like every other random shift he’s pulled, and everyone else will shrug and say “I guess a broken clock is right twice a day”.

He’s put trump in a position where the only winning option is to support Ukraine, and the losing options earns him both another public opinion and institutional battle. The question is, what threatens trump more? That bad outcome or what ever the pro-russia people have on him?

Even Putin dare not fuck with the pensions of old people. The one time he tried he got scared and pulled back.

Oh ok, so you want to lose the fucking mid terms, got it, because like… no amount of voter manipulation or dis info will help you when you fuck with the boomers health care and money.

The reality is that one side has thrown out the rule book because they realized they’d never be able to win again by playing by it and they’ve realized that they will face no real consequences for doing so because the leadership of the side is still insisting that they need to play nice.

Nor will it even work, because, like, it takes two to tango. Ukraine can just… decline to sign what ever agreement Putin and trump cook up.