Tag: Donald Trump

NO MERCY

So after 41 days of government shutdown, the longest on record, Democrats caved on the continuing resolution to fund the government.  They acquired nothing that they had wanted, especially maintaining the healthcare subsidies, except a “promise“ to vote on the subsidies in December – a promise that will be broken, of course. 

The vote was taken late on Sunday night, in the hopes people wouldn’t learn about it until it was done.  Eight Senate moderates (corporatists) were chosen to fall on their swords, because they are not up for election next year.   Long enough for the citizenry to forget this betrayal.  

Congressman Ro Khanna called on Chuck Schumer to step down as Senate Minority Leader.  Supposedly he, Schumer, was against this move by the moderates.  But if you can’t even whip the votes of your own party, you cannot save democracy.  You need to go.  AOC may come for his seat.

The progressive Internet and media convulsed.  Jon Stewart’s monologue tonight was just him screaming “I can’t fucking believe it!” interspersed with jokes.  Independent Internet media like Meidas Touch are going bananas.

Nobody can fucking believe it. This is a collapse, an utter failure, a betrayal.  Democrats put America through over a month of hardship for absolutely nothing, nothing at all.  Less than a week after the Blue Wave special elections.  After 8 million people marching for No Kings.  The citizenry told Congressional Democrats in no uncertain terms that we want them to fight for our democracy.  Instead they folded like an umbrella. 

One has to ask – if three-quarters of the citizenry wants something to happen (extend the subsidies), and it doesn’t, how can we call that democracy? 

Answer: it’s not.  

There is a lesson to be learned from this debacle.  The lesson is that Congressional Democratic leadership does not represent the citizenry.  They represent their lobbyists and corporate donors.  That is who is behind this collapse.  The stock market is starting to waver.  The airlines want their Thanksgiving travel.  Walmart wants its SNAP monies again, to support their workers and take from their customers.  They’re all afraid of the upcoming Black Friday boycott.  Senate Dems just showed us who they truly work for.  

The response needs to be a grassroots uprising to take over the party from the corporatists.  No mercy.  They are not our representatives.  They are our enemies.  There isn’t time to build out the infrastructure or secure funding for a new third party, just a year till the midterms.  And third parties seldom work in the American system anyway.  The extant Democratic Party structure is what we need.  Starting at the county level, citizen leaders take over the local Democratic Party structure, and uses it to support progressive, fiery young candidates who will take no corporate money but truly represent the people.  And elect those candidates so they will strike down Citizens United with legislation and do everything else in the New New Deal to shore up our democracy.  

We can’t wait any longer.  We the People have been the last line of defense for democracy through the entire Trump era.  Now we need to go on the offense.  Because there’s another lesson to be learned.  These people, politicians, are willing to let us starve and die while they play their power games.  It’s a matter of survival. 

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No Kings 2

I had to wrestle down my social anxiety  to do it, but we (my husband and I) went to the No Kings rally this weekend. 

Selfie!

I’m so glad we did it.  It wasn’t a protest as much as a hangout.  People gathering with costumes and signs to say, “We’re not okay with this. And we’re not afraid of you.”

You know New Orleanians are going to be creative.

CNBC was correct to name it a street party vibe. It certainly was in New Orleans.  Drums, music, crazy costumes.  Kind of a festival vibe, but a serious festival. Deep play.  Play for now, but it will turn serious if needed.

My favorite inflated animal costume: the Axolotl!

Almost seven million people turned out to say “No kings in America.” Ordinary people like me, you.  Us.  There were no serious incidents nationwide.  In New York City and Washington, DC, there were no injuries or arrests arising from the protest. There were no gun incidents. 

Old farts can rant about the “radical violent leftists” of their youth.  Half a century ago.  Things have changed. 

Progressives, leftists, Democrats are not the violent ones in this moment.  Not the gun nuts. Not the ones who spawn shooter after mass shooter.

Now, it’s the Christian Nationalists, the militant white supremacists.   Ultra-right and ultra dangerous. 

I rant.  The march made me —  us — feel good. Feel hopeful.  We’re not alone in seeing how crazy this all is.

No Kings!

Let’s hang onto that feeling and let it fuel our resistance until the next big action.  The next will be even bigger.

See you at the barricades. 😏

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This is Civil War

I feel a simmering anger at the way Reconstruction was taught to me, even in higher education. I majored in history, but even in our advanced classes, the truth was glossed over.  Reconstruction was not taught as the dismal failure that it was, where the South successfully threw off the first attempt at multi-racial democracy with sustained violence and corruption.  The federal government just gave up, and the Lost Cause myth and Jim Crow were allowed to flourish.

If we’d been taught that better, we might have an understanding of what’s happening now.  On one level, the Civil War never ended.   The battle over whether America is a white apartheid state or not has yet to be decided.

We are in an active state of civil war right now.   MAGA fascist Washington against blue states and cities.  You may not know, because the newsmedia is not covering it as the emergency it is.  

On September 30, ICE assaulted a Chicago apartment building in the dead of night with Blackhawk attack helicopters, rappelling down onto the building, smashing the windows, dragging the occupants out, some naked, shackling them in rental vans.  At the end of the multi-hour siege, ICE claimed to have arrested several “gang members.” But no warrants were ever displayed.  No badges.  No rights.

FOTUS calls it “training.”  But it is a demonstration of State power against American civilians, citizens.  Those FOTUS calls “the enemy within.”  Ordinary Americans who didn’t vote for him.  

The newsmedia folds it into the default “culture war” narrative.  No!  This is war war!  Military units and munitions deployed against American civilians in American cities because they displease the Dear Leader.  The “both sides” framing obscures the asymmetry of State violence. 

Confederates called it “Redemption” when they toppled Reconstruction.  Now MAGA claims to be “making America great” as they dismantle democracy and wage war on their fellow citizens.  

YOU NEED TO WAKE THE FUCK UP!

This is real.  This is happening now.  Our military is turned against us.  Our rights are being shredded.  FOTUS is selling FOTUS 2028 hats.  We could end our lives with this country in a state of squalid unfreedom.

Don’t wait for permission to be alarmed.  You won’t get it.  The powers that be want us to be docile, distracted lambs to the slaughter.  Don’t let the quotidian grind numb you to what is happening.  The cold war of American history has become hot again.  Don’t deny it!  We have to fight however we can.

This time, we have to finish it once and for all.  Our descendants shouldn’t have to fight this war again in another hundred years. If Nathan Bedford Forrest had danced at the end of a rope, he wouldn’t have been around to found the Ku Klux Klan.  The decent, democratic people of this country can’t make the same mistake again.  

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MAGA Never Walks It Back

When I was a kid my dad taught me about Zeno’s Paradox.  It’s a physics thought experiment from classical Greece, about time and movement.  If every step you take toward your goal halves the distance, and every step halves the remaining difference – then how do you ever reach your goal? 

MAGA’s behavior is like an Inverse Zeno’s Paradox – instead of halving, every step doubles down, and the end is not nowhere, but Armageddon.

For the last 48 hours we have been treated to a constant stream of red-faced MAGAs on social media scream-crying about how they’re “going to kill all us motherfuckers” for Charlie Kirk’s death.  Ranting, choking, calling for civil war. Just unhinged.  Jesse Waters on FOX said “they are at war with us now,” meaning the left, before the shooter was even identified.  FOTUS went on Fox and raged, the President of the United States, raged about killing “leftists.”  Red America unanimously decided, absent all evidence, that Democrats were to blame and they would be punished.  

But the call was coming from inside the house.  Kirk’s killer was a Groyper – a white supremacist, Jew-hating Nick Fuentes fan.  Not trans.  Not left.  Not a Democrat.  A white, Mormon, ultra-MAGA gun nut.   Imagine that.  

But there will be no gut-check for MAGA.  No come-to-Jesus moment.  They will not stop to reflect on their behavior. They refuse self-examination.  Since the truth is not to their liking, they will pretend this never happened, and next time it happens (because it will) they will double down, becoming even more hysterical.  More violent.  Acting it out.

It’s the tactic they take from Dear Leader: never admit error, never retract, never reflect — always double down. Increase the noise, the outrage, the wild accusations.  That’s how narcissists work.  Self-reflection feels like annihilation to them because their self-concept is so brittle, a gilded shell over a howling emptiness. 

Lot of narcissists in MAGA.  Authoritarian parenting creates them.

But this isn’t a thought experiment.  This is real life.  Escalating conflict every time you’re challenged does not lead to good order.  It leads to chaos and violence. Reverse Zeno’s Paradox. 

If you “double down” every time with political action, eventually you get to detonating nuclear bombs. 

 Most of MAGA are Christian nationalists slavering for Judgment Day anyway.  Nuclear holocaust is not a bug to them, it’s a feature.

I’m angry that MAGA as a whole, from the President on down, can conduct this anti-social, un-American behavior and receive no correction, either from within or without.  No think pieces about de-escalating the rhetoric.  No humble TikToks.  Jesse Waters isn’t going to get fired like Matthew Dowd.  No, indeed.  

So I’m doing it.  MAGA, you need to check yourself.  Your hysteria, your racism, your violence.  You all claim to be such chest-thumping patriots, but your revanchist anger is what’s destroying this country.  

For the rest of us – they won’t of course.  If anything, this episode has shown what genuinely terrible people hard-core MAGA are.  So we have to step up and do it, hold the line against extremism.  Remember what I said yesterday. Refuse the spectacle. It’s eating us alive. 

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I Don’t Even Know What to Title This

This was a hell of a weekend.  I hardly feel like I know up from down right now.  Huge protests, tiny parades, political murder, American patriotism.  Personal family stuff.  A neck-snapping series of events.

Two things are staying with me this Monday night.  I don’t know if they relate, or how they do, except perhaps they show the two poles of events in America this past weekend. 

First, every time I see that video clip of the old tank squeaking down the street in Fotus’ limp-dick parade, I feel such a hot stab of mixed shame and glee that I burst out laughing – the kind of laugh that’s forced out of you as a defense mechanism. 

@omgseriouslywtf

Empty crowd at Trump’s birthday parade. All you hear is the squeaking tanks. #omgswtf #omgseriouslywtf #trumpsbirthday #parade #military #trumpsupporters #trump #lol

♬ original sound – OMGSWTF

Shame, because it hurts to see the United States Army brought that low, used like that.  Glee, because it’s exactly what Fotus deserves, a creaky-ass vintage tank creeping alone along the street, while the few people there watch in dead silence.  An absurd, pathetic failure.  Instant karma.  This is why we don’t have these sorts of parades in the United States anyway.  They’re stupid and lame. 

The second thing is the … I guess the lack of shock I feel at the political assassinations in Minnesota.  Which by any normal metric is completely shocking and beyond the pale.  A civil society with the rule of law does not use violence to resolve political disputes.  Horrifying!

But we have been beyond the pale for quite a while now.  

This is the way things are now.  MAGA has been nursing and inculcating violence, poltical violence, for ten years.  They’ve told themselves Democrats are commie devil-worshippers and deserve what they get.  They’ve postured with their guns and cosplayed as warriors when half of them are on disability.  They have actively seeded and stoked these sentiments all across the country while denying all responsibility.  

I don’t know how we put that genie back in the bottle.  I don’t know that we do, not in my lifetime.  These people have been cultivating their rage, their violence, their sense of grievance for a decade now.  It’s no surprise when it bursts out as actual violence. 

But on the other hand there were the No Kings marches, where America stood up and flipped the big double bird to our wannabee dictator.  Even in Minnesota, where the citizens had been advised to stay home because the assassin was still at large, they defied fear and showed up by the thousands.  

I hope the world saw.  All this bullshit is against our will.  The majority of America does not want this.  We want to end it.  My intuition has always been, there are more good people than bad in the world.  But the bad people do an outsized amount of damage.  Right now the bad people are very loud and violent.  But we have to remember they are a minority.  A sick, broken minority.  But this is a democracy, and we intend to keep it. 

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This Destruction Is All for Nothing

This is one of those moments where you have to take a step back and ask—
What are we even doing?

Why is this happening?

There’s no war.
No Depression.
No invasion.
No great crisis demanding all this destruction.

We’re not reacting to catastrophe.
We’re choosing it.
Burning it all down for no good reason.

Manufactured panic.
Internet goblins.
Drag queen story hour.
Book bans.
And now, the civil service—gutted. Careers destroyed.
All for a lie.

Because some angry, scared white men would rather burn the country down that share it equitably.

I recorded this video because I couldn’t keep quiet.

Lincoln said:

> “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

And here we are.

This isn’t a righteous uprising.
It’s a tantrum.
And if we don’t say it plain, they’ll take everything with them.

It’s not about freedom.
It’s not about safety.
It’s not about survival.

It’s all for nothing.

This was hard to record.
But I had to say it.
The video’s below.

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In Praise of Public Service

It’s not easy to get a federal job. My husband Sam tried for years. The positions are highly competitive, requiring aptitude tests, education, and experience. These are not people who just stumbled into a cushy gig. They are professionals. They are competent. And they have dedicated themselves, often quietly, to the running of our society.

The Civil Service Bloodbath

Mass firings. Loyalty tests. Lifelong careers destroyed overnight. I have words about the current DOGE bloodbath in the Federal Civil Service.

It’s being handled very cavalierly by Elon and his crew of coding dweebs, and by the national press. Let me set the record straight.

The current concept of the “deep state” is either a mass of dead-eyed zombies nursing a paycheck, or a cabal of evil conspirators who are behind everything bad. But no, these are ordinary people, doing their jobs, usually for way less money than they would get in the private sector, because they care about it. Because they want to be of service.

Why Public Service Mattered to Me

My career in the public library mattered to me because it was about helping people and just giving them information, when it seems everything else in society is trying to restrict it. And it didn’t answer to the almighty dollar. It wasn’t about money. Because not everything is reducible to the bottom line. Government is not a profit-making enterprise.

Who Gets Hired and Why

There’s not much deadwood in the Federal civil service. Those are desirable jobs, even if they don’t pay as much: job security, retirement, healthcare. You have to be trained, educated. Know your shit. And you have to be prepared to wait a long time for your job application and hiring process to grind its way through the bureaucracy.

And they offer something else the private sector doesn’t: the opportunity to be of service. The Forest Service, the Postal Service, farm inspectors. There are a fair number of military veterans in the Federal ranks, because they want to continue to be of service. And they are non-partisan. Parties in power switch back and forth, individual workers have their own personal beliefs, but the work still goes on. The mail still has to be delivered. Farms still have to be inspected. The National Weather Service predicts storms. Who’s in the White House doesn’t change any of that.

Bureaucracy: The Hidden Backbone of Society

It’s human nature to bitch about how slow and useless the bureaucracy is – but when it stops working altogether: when the water stops flowing, when FEMA doesn’t come, when another salmonella outbreak occurs, people start screaming. These services are the scaffolding of modern civilized life. I think it’s better they are run by people who aren’t trying to make a profit.

How Public Service Changed Me

My time as a civil servant in the public library made me both a more compassionate and tougher person. More compassionate, because I came to see how ruthlessly human beings are used by “the system” here in the USA. Drained of their economic productivity and cast aside. And how so many people start and live their lives behind the eight ball for absolutely no fault of their own, just bad luck. Public services are supposed to help those people, not further exploit them.

But also tougher, because I needed a thick skin to embody the institutional authority that made people abide by the rules. Enforcing those rules made me more of a hardass, not less – because I came to see how enforcing “the rules” was actually the best way to ensure all the resources the library has to give were shared as equitably as possible. Everyone thinks they’re special, an exception to the rules. But if everybody’s special, nobody is, and human affairs descends into a morass of whimsy and favoritism. I feel that strongly. (The exception being those cases of actual humanitarian need. No, you can’t use the phone, but the little kid who needs to call his Mom to come get him, can.)

DOGE Firings Are an Attack on Civil Society

Look at the chaos going on with DOGE now. The propaganda is that Elon is only firing “probationary employees,” a bunch of noobs who aren’t needed. But any time you get promoted or change jobs in the civil service, you go back on “probation” for periods as long as two years. The effect of these mass DOGE firings has been to kneecap the federal civil service at every level and across the country, to disable its ability to resist Trumpian autocracy. And to rob a lot of people of their beloved careers in which they had worked decades, with no warning and for no good reason. In fact, bad ones. To consolidate personal power. Replace bureaucrats with Trumpian loyalists. Undermine public trust in the government and institutions.

Respect the Work, Defend the Workers

See the DOGE foolishness for what it really is – an attack on civilized society. On the people who keep the gears of the country turning. You don’t notice those gears when the machine is working. But when it breaks – when the roads wash out, the checks stop coming, you want us bureaucrats there, doing our jobs in service of you, the American people.

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These past few months I have said, as bad as he is, Donald Trump would probably make a less worse President than Ted Cruz. But given the events of this weekend, I don’t think that anymore.

Donald Trump is genuinely dangerous. He is emotionally unstable. He feeds on this violence and chaos like a vampire, and then bald-facedly denies it when he is pressed on it. He will actually sit there on television and say he does not condone violence, when he has said at his rallies that he would like to “punch [a protestor] in the face.” That he would like to see them “taken out on stretchers.” He has offered to pay the legal bills of any of his supporters who are charged with assaulting protestors. (Of course, he actually won’t if it comes to it, because he is a coward and a liar.) And then he has the nerve to be interviewed on live TV and say he disavows violence. It’s one of two things — either he is so emotionally erratic he doesn’t realize what he is saying when he makes these threats, and so denies them with a clear conscience, because his hold on reality is so slim. Or else he is a stone-cold pathological liar.

Doanld Trump has no character. He has no internal moral compass. He says or does whatever will make him look good or feel good or aggrandize himself at any given moment. This has been obvious to me from the start. He doesn’t have any grand scheme. He’s just playing things along. He responds to stimuli directly in front of him, like an amoeba.

Ted Cruz, as creepy and awful as he is, at least is not emotionally unstable. We know what he is, a Christian Dominionist. We know what he wants to do, turn the US into a theocracy, with a Christian version of sharia law. At least he is predictable. We have an idea of how he will govern, and can plan accordingly.

Ted Cruz also, as far as I know, is the only other Republican candidate who has chastised Trump for fomenting violence. This doesn’t happen at any one else’s rallies, he said, not mine, not Marco’s, not Hillary’s or Bernie’s. So some props to him. He isn’t a complete psycho after all. Maybe only 90 percent psycho. Or at least, he knows if you play with fire you are going to get burned.

There is no telling what Trump will do if he gains the Oval Office. Can you imagine this thin-skinned bully with the nuclear launch codes? He’ll be like General Bat Guano in the movie Dr. Strangelove. If Kim Jong Un makes fun of his short fingers, he is liable to start World War Three. He is a danger to the country and the world.

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