I mean, if you’re starting from the view that we have too many poor people for the number of billionaires, then killing off a bunch of plebs in a massive economic depression is definitely one way to balance the field. Just seems a little psychopathic to me, is all.

It’s definitely a MAGA theme, though: let bird flu run wild and all the survivors will be immune; crash the economy and all the survivors will be better off; throw out all the immigrants and every that remains will be comfortably English-speaking; jail all the protesters and everyone that remains will agree.

I think, for ‘lefties,’ the trouble is that Trump is replacing progressive income tax with regressive consumption tax. Not that US tax structure was particularly progressive, but it at least pretended. Now, the low end of the income scale, living paycheck-to-paycheck, spending everything on goods & services it going to have to spend an extra 15%, straight to federal coffers, ,while corps get a 25% tax cut and billionaires get elimination of the estate tax.

It’s schadenfreude to see billionaires lose 10 or 20% of their wealth, but they still own all the factories. They’re still going to make money, and they will make up for production reductions by reducing workforce and eliminating 100% of many worker incomes. That is why all the economists are crying recession: consumption taxes reduce consumption, reduced consumption reduces employment, unemployment reduces consumption.

I’m surprised the rest of the world hasn’t tried Russia-like sanctions on Trump. When Russia invaded Ukraine, all the countries got together to target sanctions on specific Russian oligarchs, on the theory they’d undermine political will without hurting uninvolved Russian civilians. So now, I’m imagining embargoes on Ivanka Trump’s fashion bullshit, a massive property tax rider on Trump’s Scottish golf resort; freezing the assets of Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.

Even if there’s a coherent policy goal behind the tariffs, which I doubt, achieving that goal with punitive taxes on undesirable goods means that the greatest burden falls on people with the lowest income. Reaching the same goal with promotional tax incentives means the burden is paid through our normal, slightly progressive tax system and falls more on the wealthy. Tariffs and sales taxes are the worst kind of taxes.

I’m OK with a live filibuster. Being able to “filibuster” a bill by passing a note to the teacher threatening to talk all night does not promote compromise or good lawmaking.

He’s not the majority leader any more, and without all the sycophants flattering and distracting him, it turns out that someone has been systematically sabotaging US democracy going back years.

Your articles seem to say that congress has periodically rearranged and eliminated “Article III courts,” recently avoiding the Constitutional crisis of not paying judges of the eliminated courts by posting them elsewhere. But I’m no lawyer, so maybe I’m misinterpreting “In 1891, Congress enacted legislation creating new intermediate appellate courts and eliminating the then-existing federal circuit courts.” and “In 1982, Congress enacted legislation abolishing the Article III Court of Claims and U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals”

I mean, he’s technically correct: the constitution gives congress the power “to constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court.” The only court the US technically has to have is SCOTUS, although it’s hard to imagine them hearing every single federal case.

Interestingly, Congress does not have the power to fire or reduce any judge’s salary, except by impeachment.

Disapproval is a temporary condition, anyway. Soon enough, it’ll be illegal (or at least dangerous) to express disapproval, and Trump’s numbers will be right up there with Putin and Kim.

Nevermind including a reporter in the group chat. Can we talk about why these people are using a commercial service to hold classified discussions in the first place? Like, isn’t bombing another country SCIF-type stuff? Isn’t that stuff subject to the Federal Records Act?

Wait, really? You know what Israelis do with pagers, right?

The message was supposedly fine, but you can’t have it delivered by someone with brown skin.

Seriously: “the district told the Statesman that it was not the message that was at issue, but rather the hands of different skin tones on the poster.”

https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/education/article301972094.html

You can’t promise to round up and deport 10 million “criminal, illegal immigrants” without implying that all of the ~10 million undocumented residents are criminal. Unless you’ve been listening to Ann Coulter and believe there are 50 million undocumented - 1 in every 6 people in the country.

Yup. Just going by the indexes, the stock market is down all the way to last summer. It’s been a precipitous and steady drop, but if you’re a true believer, it would be easy to say it’s just giving up a little bit of Trump bubble, hope it’s almost over, and relax. After all, they’ve still got their job or most of the stock market gains collected over the last 20 years, so their immediate personal conditions look great.

Apparently, one of the things that becomes really difficult as IQ drops even a little bit below 100 is hypothetical-conditionals. Like, “How would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast?” becomes, “But I did eat breakfast, and I feel fine.” So, looking at the economic disruption Trump’s causing, imagining that it could continue or get worse, and what that might mean for their personal situation can be a real, does-not-compute struggle.

Most of us, raised by Hollywood, imagine critical infrastructure has guards and ID checks. Keys. Guys with machine guns. The last 10 years, it’s pretty clear the major controls are just that no one tries. “I’m from DOGE” is going to be the penetration tester’s go-to social engineering hack for the next four years. Just walk in, press the Big Red Button, and leave.

He wasn’t saying to vote third party. He was saying progressive people need to get out and get in the face of office holders, threaten them with personal violence if necessary, for going along with fascist bullshit and trampling on the rights of the helpless.

He was saying that voting is bullshit. That phone calls & letters to representatives are a little, and getting out on the street matters. Especially if your representative is the other party.

This one is meant to pay back all the cryptobros who supported his campaign. Still gotta get Congress to authorize funds for it, but the cryptobros have been pumping money into those campaigns, too.

Haven’t bought eggs all year. Not over $4. Of course, for me, they’re just a nice treat…shoyu eggs make a great snack; egg baked on khachapuri; fried over rice. Some people, they’re a key protein, or essential to cakes & cookies. I figure, if the price is high, then leaving them on the shelf makes more available where they’re irreplaceable, but I can still feel bad for people who have to pay that price.

Last time I looked at Amazon’s books, their retail arm was barely profitable. Most of their actual profits came from AWS.

Azure (MS) or GCP (Google) are the alternatives.

Who wants democracy, when we can have an anarcho-capitalist libertarian utopia?