I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!

That's right because Pres. Biden wasn't a fu@@@ng lunatic who has almost no clue what-so-ever. God help us.

He despises all of us.

A new way to die on The Oregon Trail

From Palmer:

All of you either watched Donald Trump’s speech last night or you’ve heard about the lowlights. It was a debacle by any measure, and a reminder that – just six weeks in – Trump has somehow incompetently backed himself into a corner already. But nothing Trump said last night was as important as what one of Trump’s people said hours earlier.

Trump and his regime have been indiscriminately eliminating federal government jobs in alarming fashion. They gutted the FAA and then airplanes started falling out of the sky. Elon Musk admits he “accidentally” fired the people in charge of protecting us from Ebola, which he seemed to think was hilarious. But it’s not just that all this idiotic firing is making the country less functional or safe. It’s a lot of these people needed these jobs – particularly veterans.

Military veterans are often particularly well suited for federal government jobs. Many of them already have the background and training required. In other cases it’s a matter of giving a job to physically or psychologically disabled war veterans so that they can remain productive members of society; it’s the very least we can do for their service.

Because the Trump regime is trying to fire as many federal government employees as possible, this is hitting our military veterans particularly hard. What are they supposed to do now? Some of them can’t get a private sector job. But when Trump adviser Alina Habba (yes, the same Alina Habba who incompetently represented Trump in his criminal trial) was asked about these veterans, she said that these veterans are maybe “not fit to have a job.” No really, she said that.

So the Trump regime’s official stated position is that if a military veteran gets laid off from a federal government job, they probably didn’t deserve a job anyway. What are they supposed to do, become homeless? Beg on the streets? This is beyond insulting. These are the people who signed up to fight for their country, and now the Trump regime is telling them that if combat messed them up too much to be easily employable, it’s their own fault. Wow. Keep in mind that many military veterans, perhaps a majority of them, are Republican voters. But maybe not anymore.

At this point the Trump regime is handing us material daily that we can use to win the midterms in decisive fashion. Then we can impeach Trump, block his appointments and legislation, and slow him down enough to tie his hands for his final two years. Alina Habba’s ignorant, self defeating remark yesterday is just one example of the free advertising that the Trump regime keeps handing our side for next year’s midterms.

It’s now clear what our marching orders are: hold down the fort until next year’s midterms. Keep Trump off balance with protests, public pressure, smart messaging, and online activism so that we’re still a democracy by the midterms and can therefore retake control of that democracy.

 . . . 

That’s a year and a half from now, which is a long time when things are evolving this rapidly. But for now we can safely focus on just Trump’s first hundred days. Believe it or not, we’re almost halfway there (56 days to go and counting). After any President’s first hundred days, people on the fence get tired of giving him the benefit of the doubt, the media decides to go intensely negative for ratings, and that’s when a President loses momentum and leverage. So let’s focus strongly on these next 56 days. If we’re still a democracy by April 30th, there’s a good chance we’ll make it to the midterms and win them.

I could pick a fight maybe with a couple of points in here, but mainly I think I go along with almost all of it. I think there is a lot of 'puffing' up going on with the Republicans right now and it is hard to find media who are not puffing up right along with so many of the Reps. I understand to ta point, but I still say Trump and or Musk can only do what they are allowed. If everyone steps up and says no — they would not have what it takes. It is those around them who GIVE them the power.

I hope we are able to hang on and make a difference that will actually get us through this. I do think while some people are rather hopeless, many of the Reps. do have some functional brain cells that have been awakened due to being overrun when they assumed they were safe. Also, people (perhaps not affected at the moment) are likely getting nervous as the Musk machine comes roaring up. No one is safe and if they don't know it now, they soon will. All in all I do think (although it shouldn't be the case at all) we may be stuck for all four yrs. with at least Trump — but I also think he can be nullified.

I hope and pray we get out of this horror story and can take steps to insure that a Trump or a Musk or anyone from another country cannot invade our government so easily again. I had hopes that more would happen in that direction while Pres. Biden was at the helm. I think though he likely had all he could do with just trying to get us stable enough to move forward after the four destruction yrs. of Covid and Insurrection.

I think I'll always be upset that that orange abomination didn't end up charged immediately as a traitor to the U.S. and presidency and handled quickly and swiftly as should have been. I have no doubt had a Democrat behaved the same way the Reps. wouldn't have had time to blink twice before our guy went down completely. Just the fact alone that Trump sat and watched the destruction for three hours before doing anything at all was enough. Yet Garland drug his feet and here we are. I hope he has some deep regrets about this.

In the gym of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, former and future prime minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill rose to deliver a speech. Formally titled “Sinews of Peace,” the talk called for the United States and Britain to stand together against the growing menace of Soviet communism. Less than a year after the end of the war, the U.S. and its allies were concerned about the Soviets’ increasing control over the countries of eastern Europe and their apparent intent to continue spreading communism throughout the world.

“Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies,” Churchill said. He expressed “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,” but he urged Europe and the U.S. to work together to stand against “dictators or…compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police” to control an all-powerful state.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Churchill declared, and his warning that Europe had been divided in two by an iron curtain defined the coming era.

President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill’s argument. In Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing distrust between the Soviet bloc and the western allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of Berlin under western control—a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which the U.S. and the U.K. delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane—and the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security agreement to resist Soviet expansion.

The so-called Cold War between the two superpowers dominated much of geopolitics for the next several decades. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan warned that the U.S. was engaged in a titanic struggle between “right and wrong and good and evil.” The Soviet Union was the “evil empire,” preaching “the supremacy of the state” and “its omnipotence over individual man.”

When the Cold War ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, those Americans who had come to define the world as a fight between the dark forces of communism and the good forces of capitalism believed their ideology of radical individualism had triumphed. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukayama famously concluded that the victory of liberal democracy over communism meant “the end of history” as all nations gravitated toward the liberal democracy that time had proven was fundamentally a better system of government than any other.

Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand in hand.

But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.” By the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on “political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available.

Russian “political technologists” used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate.

This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

In 2004, Putin tried to extend his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, and the Ukrainian government voided the election.

To resurrect his political career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort, who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about $17 million but had no way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help. Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign but immediately let Deripaska know about his new position.

Russian operatives told Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected. They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin took control of eastern Ukraine through a “peace” plan that would end the war in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove U.S. sanctions from Russian entities.

According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”

That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”

In other words, they used “political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.

Last night, President Donald Trump illustrated the power of virtual politics when he talked for an hour and forty minutes to a joint session of Congress. He lied repeatedly, starting with the lie that he had a historic mandate—in fact, more people voted for someone else than voted for him—and moving on to the idea his first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation,” saying that the first president, George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world.

Trump’s speech was valuable not as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered supporters a shared worldview that reinforced their allegiance to the MAGA movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mourtoupalas, and Hannah Dormido of the Washington Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never before heard in a similar address to Congress: “left-wing,” “weaponized,” “lunatics,” “ideologues,” and “deepfake.” Right-wing media reinforces that virtual reality: Today on the Fox News Channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro nonsensically claimed that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”

Russian leaders created a false narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public enterprises and monopolize the country’s wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump said last night is in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” despite what the administration has told courts, told a technology conference that the government should privatize “as much as possible” and suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak and the United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also appear to be a prelude to privatization.

The Trump administration today announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs in what Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) calls a plan to gut the agency and “then push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires.”

Jess Piper of The View From Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”

In mid-February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the defense secretaries of European allies that the U.S. could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values and warned that Europe’s true threat was “the threat from within.” Two weeks later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.

Today, United States officials said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables Ukraine to target Russian positions.

In a nationally televised speech today, France president Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare to stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the United States. “The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries, affecting us,” Macron said. “I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our side, but we have to be ready if they don’t.” Yesterday, politicians in the United Kingdom angrily interpreted Vice President Vance’s dismissal of “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” as a dig at the U.K. after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the U.K. has stood alongside the U.S. repeatedly since World War II.

“We were at war with a dictator,” said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”

He drove the price of the stock market down—maybe milk and eggs are next.

Here's a good laugh for the day.

Also, this makes you wonder if Musk is buying up lots of Tesla stock up himself, so it doesn't fizzle as badly.

Exbrnxgrl:

I always find it ironic when people, too many people, say that they don’t follow politics or they hate politics. Then they complain about political decisions that affect their lives negatively 🤦🏻‍♀️.

You are so right about the above which I hadn't even thought of for quite some time. Who knows, perhaps what is going on now will HELP people learn how critical it is for them to pay a bit more attention to politics. Having said that I will admit that for some time I had the same basic malady going on in my life, but I guess the difference was that I sought out many people's opinions at the time and although I too would get into political shows and news then then — I generally ended up going with people I totally trusted more that what I heard in tv land.

I guess I mainly think — if you don't like politics why are you voting at all. Makes me wonder just what they do to determine who gets their vote. Nothing is all one way. I'm so irritated, mad and upset with the current state as far as Reps. that I pretty much just go straight Democrat, but I have had a couple of times in my 'voting' career where I was deep into consideration of the Reps. candidate — so in general care is needed each and every election — unless of course!!!

There definitely are regrets about Trump going on.

For some comic relief (plus what I'd like to do to Trump).

In a nutshell. Commend you wearing your shirt. Thank you.

Well somebody with funny colored pompadour blew it big time, didn't they??? And yes your administration and you were indeed a fool.

I say keep your salary and give back the taxpayer money and then we can talk about who can feel good about what.

Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.  Out of pain and problems have come the sweetest songs, and the most gripping stories.

Billy Graham

Still doing what he seems to do best — completely wreck shit.