The Trump Presidency, Season 2

[Free]

I was going to label him Dozy Don but that's Newsom's gag, and I don't steal from the smart comedians.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Reuters In Trump 2.0, MAGA-aligned influencers and media emerge as the new mainstream

Evernote Link

A Reuters examination details how rightist influencers and Trump officials have formed a powerful alliance, working together to target perceived adversaries, amplify false claims and reshape the media landscape. The shift comes as a growing number of social platforms and traditional outlets accommodate Trump.

Hardly news, but a deep dig into the MAGAsphere influencers and their symbiotic relationship with Trump

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Trump thinks America is Incorporated, and wants to pay almost every American $2.000 dividend. Or so, something around $680bn. in total, depending where high income will start.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Trump thinks America is Incorporated, and wants to pay almost every American $2.000 dividend. Or so, something around $680bn. in total, depending where high income will start.

He left out some stuff:

Hell has frozen over.
Pigs are, in fact, flying.
The cows have come home.

 

[Isabeau]

“I, then say your name, do solemnly swear…”

Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social)

Trump getting booed at the Commanders game

bsky.app

 

[Isabeau]

Senate near deal to reopen government

As many as 10 Democratic senators are expected to vote for a bill to reopen the government as soon as Sunday evening or early Monday morning, as a group of moderate Democrats, and even some liberals, are ready to end the 40-day shutdown.

Centrist Democrats and Republican members of the Senate Appropriations Committee were close to reaching a deal last week to reopen the government, but it was delayed by strong pushback from Senate progressives who urged their Democratic colleagues to hold out for a bigger concession on extending enhanced health insurance premium subsidies.

 

[Free]

Hey, flight cancellations in the U.S. are going through the roof. Who'd a thunk it?

Here's How Many Flights Have Been Cancelled—and How Much Worse It's About to Get

It's roughly at the level you would see in a light snow storm. For now.

gizmodo.com

The government has been shutdown for a record 39 days, and many aspects of everyday life that hinge on government funding are feeling the pinch. One of the industries hit the hardest is air travel.

Due to the shutdown, travelers around the country are facing mounting lines at security checkpoints and thousands of flight delays and cancellations as air travel tries to operate in a restricted capacity.

As of 4 p.m. ET on Sunday, there were already more than 7,500 total delays within, into or out of the U.S., according to FlightAware data. Delta Airlines, which has already canceled more than 450 flights today told NBC News that more cancellations were expected.

 

[Free]

As Isabeau noted above, the Senate Dems (lead by Schumer, of course) are still trying to snatch defeat from whatever we're in now.

Why Does Schumer Keep Trying to Cave? - The American Prospect

The Senate Democratic leader and his Gang of Eight keep trying to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. On Thursday, they told their caucus colleagues they had ten votes to reopen the government—in exchange for no real Republican concessions.

prospect.org

Most commentators, including me, concluded that the Tuesday election victory saved Democrats from capitulating to Republican demands to pass a simple continuing resolution to reopen the government, in exchange for vague assurances of a vote on Affordable Care Act subsidies that amount to nothing. But my reporting finds that at the Thursday meeting of the Senate Democratic caucus, two days after the election, Democrats very nearly capitulated once again.

Here’s what occurred. It has been widely assumed that the group of eight mostly centrist Senate Democrats, who have been looking to broker a hollow deal on Republican terms, were freelancing. In fact, they were acting with the express approval of Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and were reporting to him daily.

At Thursday’s meeting, they told their caucus colleagues that they now had ten votes to reopen the government in exchange for no real Republican concessions. At that, much of the rest of the caucus went ballistic, and some of the supposed ten said that, in fact, they were not willing to vote for any such deal.

Good thing news of this "deal" got out. Hopefully it's dead dead dead.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Nice video. One part that jumped out at me is "We don't end our sentences with prepositions." That's a very antiquated, nonsensical grammar rule. The purpose of grammar is to be clear. If every English speaker can understand you, it's proper grammar! Most linguists seem to agree with this view.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Nice video. One part that jumped out at me is "We don't end our sentences with prepositions." That's a very antiquated, nonsensical grammar rule. The purpose of grammar is to be clear. If every English speaker can understand you, it's proper grammar! Most linguists seem to agree with this view.

A lot of grammar "rules" (split infinitives, double negatives, etc.) are Victorian class markers in the UK. On the one hand, if you are classically educated you are expected to translate between English and Romance languages (Latin, French) where it is impossible to split an infinitive because of how Latin declensions work. Double negatives are a feature of many English dialects, usually a a form of emphasis("I ain't afraid of no ghost") spoken by poor people in London and Birmingham, but not in Oxford.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

It's a movie from 1994, so 31 years old. And since it was even antiquated back then I guess it was put in as extra to showcase just what a major asshole Mr. Pitkannan is. It probably fits being a professor at Harvard.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

A lot of grammar "rules" (split infinitives, double negatives, etc.) are Victorian class markers in the UK. On the one hand, if you are classically educated you are expected to translate between English and Romance languages (Latin, French) where it is impossible to split an infinitive because of how Latin declensions work. Double negatives are a feature of many English dialects, usually a a form of emphasis("I ain't afraid of no ghost") spoken by poor people in London and Birmingham, but not in Oxford.

Yep. I was just pointing out how a lot of those rules don't still have a place in the language. ...but some people still insist on them.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Nice video. One part that jumped out at me is "We don't end our sentences with prepositions." That's a very antiquated, nonsensical grammar rule. The purpose of grammar is to be clear. If every English speaker can understand you, it's proper grammar! Most linguists seem to agree with this view.

A group of college students were sitting down to lunch in the campus dining hall, when one of them asked, "where's the ketchup at?"

A professor was walking by and overheard the question. He spoke up and said, "we do not end our sentences with prepositions."

The student rephrased, "okay, where's the ketchup at, asshole?"

 

[Free]

Senator Who Caved on Shutdown Says “Standing Up to Trump Didn’t Work”

It doesn’t get more pathetic than this.

newrepublic.com

Senator Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, didn’t seem to think standing up to Donald Trump would work in the government shutdown standoff.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday morning, King said that he supported Democrats’ shutdown strategy, the goals of which were, in his view, to stand up to Trump and resolve the issue of expiring health care subsidies. But he said the shutdown wasn’t accomplishing either goal, and there was “zero likelihood it was going to.”

“In terms of standing up to Donald Trump, the shutdown actually gave him more power,” King said, pointing out the president’s refusal to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program despite multiple court orders, as well as the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were among the few government employees still getting paid during the shutdown.

“Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work. It actually gave him more power,” King concluded.

Is it ironic that King is bowing down to Trump? Which is apparently how he thinks you do not give power to him.

 

[Free]

Convicted Child Sex Predator Avoids Prison Thanks to Trump Pardon

Andrew Taake is free despite pleading guilty to the crime.

newrepublic.com

Andrew Taake, who was serving time for taking part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, benefited from Trump’s broad pardons in two ways thanks to an unusual deal first reported by The Daily Beast.

Taake was convicted of attacking a police officer at the Capitol with bear spray and a whip during the riots. He had also previously been charged in Harris County, Texas, with sending explicit photos and messages to someone who he thought was a 15-year-old girl, and he was out on bond when he took part in the riots. The “girl” on the Plenty of Fish dating site Taake was communicating with was an undercover police officer, and he didn’t stop messaging her after learning her age.

But thanks to the time he served for January 6 before Trump’s pardon, most of which was in pretrial detention, Taake accrued about three years and seven months of “credit,” for his earlier sex crimes, according to Harris County court documents. Taake was only sentenced for his crimes at the Capitol last summer, and thanks to Trump’s blanket pardon, was released from the federal ADX Florence supermax prison in January just months into his six-year term.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Senator Who Caved on Shutdown Says “Standing Up to Trump Didn’t Work”

It doesn’t get more pathetic than this.

newrepublic.com

Is it ironic that King is bowing down to Trump? Which is apparently how he thinks you do not give power to him.

"No Kings" protesters probably feel even more motivated/justified now.

 

[Beebo Brink]

"No Kings" protesters probably feel even more motivated/justified now.

Here's what Indivisible had to say in a recent email:

Hi friends,

If you haven’t seen, Senate Democrats surrendered. What I am about to write may sound calm and collected, but know that I am channeling my searing hot incandescent rage in an effort to explain what went down, and what it requires of all of us next.

1. This was a surrender.
We didn’t just get a “bad deal” -- we got essentially nothing. The original Dem demands were threefold:

Permanent extension of the ACA subsidies
Medicaid funding restored
No more blank checks for the regime (rescission/impoundment restrictions)

Democrats dropped the Medicaid funding demands immediately after making them. They then stopped talking about rescission and impoundment. They dropped from “permanent” to “multi-year” to, finally, “one year” of ACA subsidies this week. A one-year extension -- Schumer's offer on Friday -- is actually the same demand as front-line Republican House members scared about reelection. But they couldn’t even hold the line there -- they surrendered without even getting that.

2. The vote itself was a bit of Kabuki theater.
Conveniently for them, none of the eight Senate Dems who voted for this are up for reelection next year. That’s by design. There’s going to be a lot of well-deserved anger directed at those specific eight Dems, but make no mistake -- this vote was stage-managed.

The way this works is that a critical mass of Dems within the caucus decides they’re going to surrender, they look at the number of votes they need to do it (eight), and they agree on eight Dems who don’t have to face voters anytime soon. That’s why Senators like Mark Warner can vote against it, even though they were widely known to be drivers behind the surrender.

This is not true of literally every Senate Dem -- we know that a bunch of folks, like Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen were arguing strongly against it behind closed doors. But many who voted no publicly helped engineer this surrender privately.

3. Schumer and Dem Senate leadership broadly failed.
Chuck Schumer, Brian Schatz, and Kirsten Gillibrand all voted for the March surrender, but voted against this surrender. Is that a meaningful shift? No.

Even aside from the Kabuki theater aspect of all this, it's the leadership's job to unify the Dem caucus to fight the fascists. That’s it. Their individual votes are irrelevant. If the Dem caucus fractures and fails to unify against the Bad Republican Bill, then that’s a failure of both the individual senators who caved and leadership for failing to lead the caucus.

We do not know now and will never know for sure if Schumer orchestrated this (my suspicion) or if he simply lacked the leadership skills to prevent it (also possible). But we don’t have to know the reason -- it is just factually true that he and the rest of the leadership team failed to hold their own caucus together.

Combine #3 with #2 above, and it leads here: If you’ve got a Senate Dem who is not calling for new leadership, they’re part of the problem. We should no longer trust Senate Dems who decline to come out against the leadership that led us here. Until proven otherwise, we should assume they were in on the game to fool their own supporters. It is easy to disabuse us of that assumption -- they just have to publicly make the popular call for new leadership.

4. This is bad policy.
The Republican budget guarantees that healthcare premiums will continue to skyrocket, rural hospitals will close, more people will go without healthcare, and more people will die. It does nothing to stop Trump from treating the federal budget as his personal piggybank.

The “win” some Dems are claiming is bullshit. They got a pinky-promise agreement from Republicans for a vote on ACA subsidies 40 days from now. They do not have the votes to win on that with serious concessions in both the House and Senate. It’s fake.

5. This is bad politics.
Senate Democrats surrendered when they had maximum leverage and were winning the fight. This surrender came weeks after the largest protest in American history, and days after the best election night in a decade or more. The public opinion polling showed Democrats were winning the fight, and the party’s own approval ratings were rising in response to them keeping up the fight.

We know where Indivisibles were on this. We polled them after last week’s "What’s the Plan?"call asking if Dems should take a GOP deal to reopen the government, or if they should continue fighting for ACA subsidies. 98.67% wanted to continue the fight!

This week, for the first time all year, Democrats were riding high. The regime was on the ropes. We had just clobbered them last Tuesday -- crushing the regime electorally everywhere. To surrender now is a message to all rank-and-file Democrats: "We don’t care that you want us to fight." I agreed with Brian Beutler’s take last night: the surrender in March felt like a reflection of “poor morale and low self-confidence.” This surrender is “throwing the fight.”

If the Senate leadership’s goal was to demobilize and depress rank-and-file Democrats, they could not have played their cards better.

6. The surrender will embolden the regime to do more damage.
The threat from Trump and Republicans is real and existential. They are violently attacking our communities, looting our services to serve their billionaire buddies, and shredding the Constitution. They’re behaving like they won’t ever be out of power again, because that’s their plan. There is nothing more urgent than ensuring they do not succeed.

By surrendering so utterly and completely at a moment of their maximum leverage and momentum, Senate Democrats teach Trump and his cadre an important lesson: do enough damage, and your opponents will buckle. This is an extremely dangerous lesson for Trump to learn as he ramps up his attacks on blue states and cities and prepares to steal the midterm elections. Because of this surrender, our democracy is more imperiled now than it was before.

7. The only path to a real opposition party is through a cleansing primary season.
We have spent a year now trying to convince the Democratic Party to unify and fight back. It started as a lonely fight shortly after the election, but our numbers grew. We’ve seen some Democrats lead from the beginning, some come around, and some do their best to at least perform resistance. There’s been real progress -- in large part because of our collective work.

But at some point, you gotta either change your leaders’ minds or you gotta change your leaders. And the time for changing minds is over.

After this week, we should expect more fecklessness unless we demand a change. You don’t demand that change in a general election -- you do it in primaries. And conveniently, primaries are right around the corner.

This all leads to one big announcement. Today, Indivisible is launching the largest Democratic primary program we’ve ever run.

This isn’t about left vs right. This is about fighting back vs losing. The regime’s threats are too real and the stakes are too high to settle for the feckless, loser version of the Democratic Party we saw this week. As we head into the midterms next year, we need a Democratic Party that inspires and instills pride. In this moment when the fascists are on the march, we need a Democratic Party with a spine.

Our primary program will include both the House and Senate. We will work with Indivisible groups to identify key races, provide support on the ground, and tap into movement energy across the country to boost candidates with a spine. One thing we can say for sure: We will not back any Senate primary candidate unless they call for Schumer to step down as Majority Leader.

And after the primary, whatever happens, we will rally behind the winner, and crush the regime electorally in the midterms just like we did this last week.

There will be much more to announce soon, but here are a few things we’ll ask you to do right now:

If you’re as pissed as I am and this all resonates with you, sign up to be part of this campaign to rebuild the Democratic Party today.
If you’ve got a Democratic Representative in the House, call them today and tell them not to be a party to this surrender -- or we’ll remember it next year. Yes, Republicans can likely pass this through the House without Democratic votes, but Dems don’t need to make it easier for them or put their names on a bill that betrays their constituents.
If you’re raring to do even more, you can also chip in to help us get this primary project off the ground. We’re going to be counting on grassroots supporters to fund this, but there will be many, many ways to get involved, so only give if you can.

We get the party we demand, and we intend to demand one that fights -- a Democratic Party with a spine.

In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Casey Pelous]

Here's what Indivisible had to say in a recent email:

Apparently, the message for some Democrats from last week's Blue Tsunami was, "Give up."

JFC.