From w7com on Mastodon.Social:
- In Juanita Jean’s Salon, a campaign against immigrants “poisoning our blood” and promises to “drain the swamp” sounded familiar. So did crazy power grabs after a narrow election.
So guess what a brief search through history reveals?
- Dave Columbo covers the week of Trump tacky and Musk slashes
View on Threads - Dave Dubya is back (Yay!), applying Elon Musk’s standards to Elon Musk.
- In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson reviews a simple contrast in financial policy.
Democrats believe socially beneficial programs should be funded according to ability to pay. Wealthier people should pay more.
Republicans want massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Originally, the theory was that tax slashes for the fabulously rich would promote investment and spending, which would promote growth. Tax cuts would pay for themselves.
Since that theory has been tried multiple times without success, Republicans have quietly shifted focus to cutting taxes for the wealthy by eliminating programs for widows and orphans and ABMs (as William F. Buckley once put it.).
Problem is those programs are popular, and cutting them down means losing elections.
Which is why Republicans are currently relying on Elon Musk to find or invent waste and fraud. Then chop down popular programs as part of that campaign.
So far, voters are becoming mad as all hell.
The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.
- Juliet at Decoding Fox News brings us Fox again pretending everyone loves Elon Musk, as voters scream they hate him.
Even more striking in podcast format.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit has the news item as House Republican leadership directs members to stop meeting with voters, because voters are too hostile.
- Tommy Christopher watches CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale get specific, listing Donald Trump’s 13 biggest lies in his first month
- CalicoJack in The Psy of Life examines a propaganda technique, a firehose of lies used as a sledgehammer against our democratic foundation of trust in truth.
Key source:
It is an extension of the old Soviet-era technique based on obfuscation and the creation of useful idiots who will continue spreading the message without realizing they are doing so.Jack goes on to explore psychological mechanisms that allow misinformation to flourish, particularly among MAGA supporters.
- Nan’s Notebook asks readers how they think, hope, fear Trump will change their individual everyday lives.
- From The Borowitz Report: Trump threatens to deport chickens unless they lower the price of eggs.
- In Hackwhackers an interim US Attorney is less interested in justice than in protecting a MAGA Congressman from being charged with beating a woman friend.
- Brian Beutler sees two great dangers posed by the criminals currently in control of the federal government.
One is that those Trumpers won’t be held accountable.
The other is that they will.Key sub-headline:
Crooks who think justice might catch up to them WILL become desperate. - A President can find excellent arguments against allowing transgendered men-turned-women to participate in women’s sports.
I am the law is probably not the best.
Iron Knee at Political Irony goes historical, tying Trump to an earlier would be monarch.
Key context:
L’État, c’est moi! - So Trump investigates to determine whether there is really gold in Fort Knox.
In the Ant Farmer’s Almanac Geraldo is (And isn’t) ready to open the Fort Knox vault on live TV!
(Oh, COME ON! I know it’s satire) - tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors marvels at the incompetence as lawyers for the Trump administration are unable to tell a judge the identity of their client.
Key question (Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to the defense team):
Okay, everybody at the table speak up over there if you know anything else.
[Silence.] - News Corpse has Russian TV boasting that Trump sees things exactly as Russia does.
Key agreement (Quoting Vladimir Solovyov, Russian Television)
“The phrases he’s saying are so deep and so correct, they are in total alignment with the way we see things.” - Frances Langum introduces a President whose warning about the last temptation to sell out to an aggressive dictator still rings true today.
- James Wigderson provides a conservative view of our historic betrayal of Ukraine.
Key summary:
It will take generations of American leaders to undo the damage and restore our reputation. - Infidel753 finds a note of optimism as the US under Trump shamefully retreats from helping Ukraine. Europe is rising to the challenge without us.
Key indicators:
Even today, democratic Europe is not weak. While the Ukraine war has highlighted the pathetic decrepitude of Russia’s military equipment, the UK and France have modern and well-maintained military forces. They also have their own nuclear arsenals which, while smaller than those of the US and Russia, are more than sufficient to annihilate every target in European Russia worth destroying. Russia does not even have a functioning aircraft carrier, and there is abundant reason to think that most of its nuclear weapons no longer work properly and would be almost as dangerous to Russia as to the target countries if Putin ever tried to use them. - When they are confronted with Trump lies about Ukraine, Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged, suggests that more politicos may want to adopt the unusual tactic of French President Emmanuel Macron: tell the truth, right to Trump’s face
- Journalist David Dayen, and others, postulate that the Trump coup is over. He’s already lost.
Julian Sanchez says David is real wrong:
This is dangerously sanguine. He has years to keep purging the federal bureaucracy & bending it to his service.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 1:42 PM
and explains why:
If you’ve stacked the institutions suitably, you’re president for as long as they agree you’re president.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) February 25, 2025 at 12:25 AM
- Disaffected and it Feels So Good finds a Democratic governor willing to defy Trump and another inspired to follow suit.
- Scotties Playtime reviews the recent Republican effort in Utah to enact a ban on pride flags while allowing Nazi flags.
- driftglass finds a relic of a bygone era, when it was so fashionable to fight fascism that movies were marketed on that patriotic duty.
Key film:
Today, the sentiment expressed in the promotional text on this poster for Warner Brothers’ 1944 film, “Passage to Marseilles” is almost literally unimaginable: a mainstream movie company marketing its film to the general public on the explicit claim that it is every freedom-loving person’s duty to fight fascism whatever the cost. - Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire News Group go to podcast, examining a new MAGA idea to be administered through RFK, Jr – the wellness farm – in which those with chronic (which is to say inherited) disabilities can be taken out of the general population and isolated for their own good. Seems like an old idea newly borrowed from the eugenics movement by White Nationalists to promote racial perfection.
- Associated Press will not play Trump’s silly game, renaming what has always been, within any living person’s memory – or what any person within any living person’s memory would have remembered, the Gulf of Mexico.
So Trump orders that AP no longer be allowed in the White House Press Briefing room.
For not reporting the new fiction as if it is the truth.
AP has filed a lawsuit against this violation of Freedom of the Press.
The White House Correspondents’ Association, along with pretty much every press organization, is up in arms.
What comes next? Will reporters be barred for failing to meet other requirements? How about renaming the President God Emperor Trump and excluding anyone not referring to him under his new title?
They have a point. Excluding AP is ridiculously petty, a penalty for refusing to report a made up fantasy as fact, an attempt to intimidate other news organizations into reporting news only as Trump deems fitting.
At The Moderate Voice, David Robertson says what the action is not: a violation of the First Amendment.
Key objection:
This controversy can be boiled down to this question: Who has the authority to determine who can sit inside the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room?
Does the First Amendment say that all who have Press credentials have a right to access to that room in the White House? Does the First Amendment give all who have Press credentials the right to be in any part of the White House that they want to be in?
Does the First Amendment say that the White House Press Secretary or Deputy Press Secretary or the POTUS or anyone else in the White House MUST give statements in front of anyone who has Press credentials? - This:
What the hell?!!
— burrland01.bsky.social (@burrland01.bsky.social) February 27, 2025 at 9:21 AM
- PZ Myers presents a prominent Christian who knows how to dramatically reduce crime: examine incoming faces at our borders for sinister character traits!
Key availability (Direct quote):
Simple basic science, easily taught to everyone, we just refuse to use it. - Right Wing Watch has the video, as Christian nationalist pastor Andrew Isker explains to viewers that Jews do not deserve “A Seat At The Table” because “this country belongs to Jesus”:
Key exclusion:
“What is the Judeo-Christian thing?” asked Isker. “We think it’s the antidote to secularism to say, ‘Oh, we need to return to our Judeo-Christian traditions.’ It’s not. To use the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian,’ you might as well put a coexist bumper sticker on your car.”Me: Your terms are acceptable:
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz wonders if America is becoming a post-empathy nation
Key summary:
Though so many here still loudly claim to embrace both the Golden Rule and Jesus’ command to love others as they love themselves, an increasingly-loud army of self-identified faith-filled Americans seem incapable of asking (or simply refuse to ask) a seemingly elemental question undergirding their faith tradition:
“What is it like to be someone else?” - Bruce Gerencser writes to the editor, asking if the GOP is God’s Only Party.
- M. Bouffant at Web of Evil is encountering more maddening landlord problems to add to the infuriating issues already there.
Nobody ought to be treated this way.
- Clickbait satirist Reductress provides 4 helpful grounding techniques that are not as effective as throwing your computer out an open window.
- John Scalzi has photographic evidence of the murder of his mailbox.
- @whiskeywhistle98 has kids who REALLY know how to ask:
- This is brilliant.
Sarah Cooper as a typical CNN interviewer has questions for Sarah Cooper as a newly discovered anglerfish who became an unexpected movie star:
- At The Onion, a tragic story of a man who has come to feel that his life is an endless cycle of working, eating, sleeping, and getting abducted by aliens.
- In Happiness Between Tails da-AL carries the ingredients and directions from husband Khashayar Parsi in a recipe for Pesto Frittata.
- In Georgia baseball The Savanna Bananas remember how a sort of team pitch combined with country group dance got a strike.
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