#WELCOME TO AMERICA

[real-american]

OMFG TRUMP IS A FUCKING BOSS!! THIS IS HILARIOUS AND AWESOME.

According to two people at the table who heard the discussion, Trump, while cordial and welcoming, was very direct when it came to what he wants from his counterpart to the North

Paraphrasing the discussion, Trump told him Canada has failed the U.S. border by allowing large amounts of drugs and people across the border, including illegal immigrants from over 70 different countries

Sources say Trump became more animated when it came to the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, which he estimated to be more than $100 billion

The president-elect told the prime minister if Canada cannot fix the border issues and trade deficit, he will levy a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods on day one when he returns to office

Trudeau told Trump he cannot levy the tariff because it would kill the Canadian economy completely. Trump replied – asking, so your country can't survive unless it's ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion? 

Trump then suggested to Trudeau that Canada become the 51st state, which caused the prime minister and others to laugh nervously, sources told Fox News

But he continued, telling Trudeau that prime minister is a better title, though he could still be governor of the 51st state

Sources told Fox News someone at the table chimed in and advised Trump that Canada would be a very liberal state, which received even more laughter. Trump suggested that Canada could possibly become two states: a conservative and a liberal one

He told Trudeau that if he cannot handle his list of demands without ripping the U.S. off in trade, maybe Canada should really become a state or two and Trudeau could become a governor

While sources say the exchange got many laughs, Trump delivered the message that he expected change by January 20

[artistintherough]

Leading actor, Civil Rights activist, and groundbreaker James Earl Jones has passed. I first saw him in Welcome To America and of course I remember those iconic voice roles of Darth Vader and Mufasa. He was 93. Rest In Paradise!

[princess-kurosaki]

Only in America do we take away a group of people’s rights while not knowing how to prevent school shootings. I don’t think people realize how wild that is. If he can do it to one group of people with “the stroke of his pen” what makes you think any other group is safe…..?

[silelda]

Soap: Is there something about this place that everyone is great, except that they will murder you if you cross them?

König: There is a certain personality type that thrives here, yes.

[elizabeth-karenina]

The only thing I’m able to feel right now is disgust and humiliation.

Disgust at the idea that this is the best we have to offer. Disgust at how racist and misogynistic and arrogant the country I live in is. Disgust at how all the things we do in this country severely affects what goes on in the larger world, and how we don’t care as long as we benefit here at home.

Maybe you have hope somehow right now. As for my own country, it’s hard for me to have hope for it. Usually, I’m an optimistic person who believes in the goodness of people. But after so much has happened, it’s hard for me to stay positive.

But I do know now that I value community more than ever, and I will not be silent about fascism, racism, sexism, and imperialism no matter where it may be. My heart is with marginalized people in this country and abroad. My heart is with Palestine, even though we were already bombing them in the previous administration. My heart is with the world, and all the good people who reside in it and who genuinely want to make it a better place.

[dewitty1]

[thebluestockingfirefly]

There are a lot of things I could say right now. A lot of emotions roiling and punching and screaming to be vocalized. But I don't have the strength right now to articulate all of that. What I will say is this.

I'm a disabled woman. I've been disabled nearly all of my life. I had severe chronic kidney infections requiring multi-weekly injections from the time I was three months old until I was four and a half, when I had major surgery - without which, I'd be dead by now. I bear scars and an undersized kidney and the gratefulness I didn't almost die from giardia like my sister. I had about a year and a half between recovering from my surgery and starting to get sick again; in that time, I won the Presidential Fitness Award, played soccer, and did gymnastics, and was so skilled at the latter that they wanted to train me privately for competition (terrible at soccer, though. oof). In second grade, the PE teacher called my parents because I was no longer able to participate the way I had before, and she was worried. Took several more years before I was finally diagnosed with what was then called chronic fatigue syndrome. I got progressively sicker from there. My parents didn't think I'd finish fourth grade because I missed so much of the school year due to being sick. No one thought I'd finish high school, and a huge part of the reason I graduated was because I had a 504, and parents who fought for me to get that 504 - and an advisor who dated the expiry date for it past the time I'd graduate, because the administration had nearly refused to grant it to me and she wanted to make sure it wouldn't be taken away.

I've fought every step of the way to achieve what I have, but I absolutely wouldn't have got there if it weren't for the fact that disability rights legislation exists - and it exists because of hard-fought battles by disability rights activists. Disability rights are still a relatively recent thing - the ADA was only passed in 1990 - and people with disabilities are still regularly left out of rights conversations. And, lest you think 'oh, well, I'm not disabled' - guess what? You're going to get old. A split second might change your life. Disability is the one demographic literally anyone could find themselves in at any time, and are increasinbly likely to become a member of as they age. People with disabilities are uniquely vulnerable to the whims of governments, and looking forward, it is an absolute surety that our rights - our very value as human beings deserving of life and respect and love - will be in danger. Our lives will be in danger. Medicaid and Medicare are both at extreme risk. Health insurance coverage in general is almost certainly going to contract and exclude a hell of a lot of us. (I lived in the UK during the 2016 election knowing I was moving back to America in 2017 and sobbed at the results because I was terrified.) Access to care in general is also likely to seep away like toxins into groundwater, leaving far too many without access to vital and necessary means to survive.

To sum up: people with disabilities are going to die. And if you don't care about that, if you can't be bothered, I have only this to say to you: go fucking trip in a pothole and break your neck on the way down.

Moving on to a different topic.

Two of my closest, dearest friends are queer. Very different identities, very different people, both people without whom I'm not sure I'd have survived the last decade. You know who not only doesn't give a shit about people with queer identities but is actively advocating to relegate them to statuses less than human? Yeah. The shithead America just elected as president. It's made trans identities a pointed, specific point of attack, demonizing people who literally only want to be seen as normal so they can carry on with life. The vitriol spewed at trans individuals, at anyone who isn't cis-het, is horrific and disgusting and now has an even greater platform to not only continue to demonize perfectly normal people but also actively legislate to remove their rights, along with those of anyone who doesn't happen to identify with their assigned gender at birth or a strictly heterosexual attraction to others.

As my last futile shriek into the night, for now, I return to the fact that I'm a woman. I've been on birth control since I was 18. I currently have an IUD. I used to have the arm implant thing. For most of the time that I've been using birth control, the goal has been to control, minimize, or largely eliminate my period, but I'm gonna be honest here: I've also used it to keep from getting pregnant (gasp, shock, horror, go fuck yourself if you think this is somehow unacceptable). But guess what? Birth control is a vitally important way in which people are able to exercise autonomy over their bodies. How we are able to choose to be intimate with men without being terrified that doing so will irrevocably alter our lives in a way over which we have no say. How we're able to avoid having to face the decision to have an abortion. When my mother was a young woman, abortion was illegal. Didn't matter the circumstances, didn't matter the timeline; you got pregnant, no matter how, you had almost no options. If you decided to end your pregnancy and were lucky, you might visit a doctor who knew what they were doing and provided competent care without risking your life, and survive to one day have a family, if you wanted. If you weren't, you might end up with permanent damage to your reproductive organs that meant you could never have children. Or dead.

We started a return to this reality several years ago, when Roe v. Wade was repealed by the Supreme Court and states across the country instituted extreme abortion bans that basically said a hearty Fuck You to every woman in this country. Women have died as a result, women who should be alive right now. Children are living without their mothers because doctors are scared to provide necessary care. And now even more women are going to die. I live in a blue state with no restrictions on abortion and I'm fucking terrified because my rights, my autonomy, my ability to make my own fucking decisions about myself, my body, my own damn life are in question despite where I live. I'm a person. Every fucking woman is a person. We deserve to be able to decide what the fuck we want to do with our bodies, without anyone else's input.

[mateushonrado]

We've lost a legend

Status Post #11381: James Earl Jones has passed away at age 93 and I'm really gutted about it. Now, I would include Darth Vader and Mufasa but instead, I'm going with his roles as Thulsa Doom and King Jaffe Joffer instead.

[chillingwithtavesss]

Living in America is exhausting sometimes . Everyone being against each other and we can’t progress much because of it. We need to mutha fuckin’ get it together.

[please-return-to-villanelle]

Meanwhile in America

[victusinveritas]

[shadowbrightshine]

Welcome to the Midwest! Where we have all three seasons in one week!

[psalacanthea]

what

[soy-soi-si]

Guess who's school just had a lockdown drill Then an actual fire alarm pulled while it's Snowing. I'm freezing

[pmmdj]

When it starts, they will not look like the bad guys from the history books or those movies.

They will be going after undocumented immigrants to protect American jobs. That is what their voters wanted, right? But there are so many, so they will empower local police to help them with this massive undertaking. There will not be any oversight over this, so if you think about the worse offenses committed by our police nationwide on a daily basis already, protected by qualified immunity, and now backed by a friendly executive branch and Supreme Court. But they will explain how they are just 'working with the states.' And anything that does come to light, well, those were just a couple bad apples. We know how this goes already.

With so many undocumented migrants rounded up, well, it will be hard to hold them all in our already overcrowded prisons and jails. They won't build concentration camps, they will build 'temporary detainment facilities' that are just until the crisis is over, of course. They will be run by private companies, who have already proven bad at it, but there will not be any pushback, because they are 'just trying to keep us safe' of course. The conditions in them will be bad, but that is what they deserve for being here illegally, their supporters will say. The deaths will be covered up.

They will try to end birthright citizenship, so they can decide who is and is not a 'real' American. They have already said this. And they won't say that it will be determined by your skintone, because how dare you imply they are racist.

To 'protect the children' from certain topics, any discussion of gender or sexuality will be made illegal in school. They will offer bounties like they have in Texas already to encourage your neighbors to turn you in. Gender-affirming care will be ruled as 'unsafe' and 'untested' by political appointees, despite decades of it being safe and effective. Federal rules will say that only the gender on your original birth certificate will matter, and federal rules will be put in place to only allow those pronouns on legal documents. As smarter people have said, the cruelty is the point.

They will find an excuse to say the Obergefell decision was unfairly decided, and it will be eliminated. Again, they already said they were going to do this.

They have already targeted bodily autonomy for women. This will only get worse as time goes on.

Massive tax cuts to the rich and corporations will show up early and face no real resistance. There will be no discussion of how to pay for them. In the face of the government bleeding money from those (plus the tariffs they have planned) they will slash any and all social services. They will privatize social security (long a dream of theirs.) It will go as well as you expect. But they will blame anything other than their financial mismanagement.

The EPA, if it is not cut closed completely, will have no enforcement powers or authority. What little we were doing about climate change will be gone. National parks will be open for business development.

The Department of Education will also be gutted, and have no enforcement power. They will again say they are just returning the power to the states. We all know what they mean by states rights. We had a whole war about it. Money will flow to private religious schools and charter schools. Public schools, already in a funding crisis, will be left out to dry.

Ukraine will fall. The Palestinian genocide will continue with full support of our government. There will be no help for Sudan.

Prices will go up from the planned tariffs and labor shortages. Corporations will use this excuse to gouge consumers, like they did earlier this year. Housing prices will not improve, because, again, it is not affecting the people with the money. Income inequality will only accelerate.

In the name of voter fraud (of which there was never any evidence) there will be no effort to stop voter disenfranchisement at the state level. This will target blue counties, like pretty much every large city, even in the reddest of states. This will preserve their hold on power. Gerrymandering will run rampant. Blue states will do what they can in their own borders, but we saw how those numbers played out last night. And expect their federal funding to get cut as well.

Any hope of effective third parties is gone; they have no reason to support ranked choice voting. Any dreams of eliminating the electoral college, also gone. Why would they change a system that works so well for them?

All the court cases against the president elect just went up in smoke. And even if one happened to magically continue, the vice president elect would just carry on with all the policies above. It is not just one person. It never was. It was who is backing him, and why they are doing it.

Speaking of court cases, investigations against domestic terrorism on the right will also go away. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and other worse groups will grow and gain power in local communities.

It will be hard to read about these things happening. Major news organizations have already been bought out by billionaires who support this. That is one of the reasons we got to where we are. Independent journalists and nonprofits were already hurting for funding, and now will be subject to unfounded investigations.

So, welcome to America 2025. We are all in this together. Save as many lives as possible.

-Paul Jacobus, 11-6-2024

[mudwerks]

(via Humana also using AI tool with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit claims | Ars Technica)

welcome to america