#fire the gop

[thatstormygeek]

We are literally facing the authoritarian future that John Stormer was warning us about back in 1964. Only instead of “communists” in the State Department, it’s a billionaire president with the avowed goal of ending union rights and locking up or using the Army with live ammunition against those who protest his policies.

Kirk and his followers essentially predicted in 1951 that if today’s “hairdressers and working tallow-chandlers” — college students, women, working-class people, and people of color — ever got even close to social and political power at the same level as wealthy white men, there would essentially be a communist revolution in the US, handing us over to Stalin and his Politburo. ... Wealthy white conservatives freaked out as the morbidly rich promoted the idea that America was experiencing a “moral decline” that could only be fixed by ending the union movement and other “liberal” causes that shared the union movements’ populist goals. They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night: the “communists” — those uppity racial minorities, women who’d forgotten their “rightful place in society,” students who objected to Vietnam, unionized workers, and gender minorities — were on the verge of “taking over” America.

Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college across the nation so students would live in fear rather than be willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against their scapegoats, particularly the hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding an end to police killings. They also wanted to outlaw abortion, to put women “back in their place.”

Thus, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times. For example, he put income taxes on Social Security and unemployment payments, and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people. He ended the tax deductibility of credit-card, car-loan, and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires from 74% to 25%. (There were only a handful of billionaires in America then, in large part because of previous tax policies; today’s democracy-destroying explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts on the rich.) Reagan declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American workforce when he came into office to around 10% at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidencies. It’s just now beginning to recover from its low of 6% of the private workforce.

[thatstormygeek]

How many fucking leftists do y'all think there are in the US? If it's a significant enough voting block to always swing elections (or maybe only when dems lose...) maybe we deserve some sort of representation in our government?

But I think the people posting shit like this really know, deep down, that leftists aren't actually powerful enough to do all the shit they attribute to us. But it sure does make them feel good to blame us.

It's especially lovely as a trans leftist in a red state to once again see a bunch of fucking blue state cishet white libs patting themselves on the back with one hand while punching left with the other.

[nando161mando]

Rehabilitation, not Devastation. Fuck The Police.

[thatstormygeek]

This is why so many of us are on the Dems to DO SOMETHING even if the GOP will roll it back or fight it or whatever. ACA was so difficult to gut because conservatives LIKE not having pre-existing condition carve-outs. Once they had the benefit, there would be hell to pay if their reps took it away. So the GOP had to promise to repeal "Obamacare" and replace it with something "better" without taking away all the cool shit people like about the ACA.

So yeah, give people student loan forgiveness. And make college free. Start up UBI. Whatever it is that y'all keep saying "but the GOP will kill it immediately when they get into power" as an excuse to NOT EVEN TRY.

It's much, much more difficult to take something back than to avoid giving it in the first place. In theory, people might be willing to go without so the folks they hate will be more miserable, but in practice? People like their shit.

I spend a lot of time keeping track of right wing media figures for work, and to be perfectly honest I'm cautiously optimistic. The Limbaugh era was turbo-charged by a combination of organized evangelical voting blocks, post-9/11 patriotism, and once-in-a-generation media personalities, that are all running on fumes now. They've got momentum, but it's coasting.

While on the other hand, the resurgence of union power is seeing people actually working with their community to materially improve their lives. That's the concrete for a strong foundation.

I don't really have a point here, I'm just sharing some guarded optimism.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

Until they find a way around it.

[beauty-funny-trippy]

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said President-elect Donald Trump may seek to withhold federal disaster aid to California because it is a blue state, as multiple wildfires rage in and around Los Angeles. "He's tried to do it in the past," said Newsom. "He's not just done it here in California. He's done it in states all across the country." Former Trump White House official Mark Harvey said that Trump refused to authorize disaster aid for California in 2018 because it leans Democrat, but finally, with much convincing, reversed his position after learning that the affected area was in Orange County, which for generations had been a GOP stronghold. "We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you," said Harvey. Trump also withheld wildfire assistance for Washington state in 2020, and severely restricted emergency hurricane relief to Puerto Rico in 2017 because he felt these places were not sufficiently supportive of him. “It was clear that Trump was entirely self-interested and vengeful towards those he perceived didn’t vote for him,” said Kevin Carroll, a Trump administration official. “He even wanted to pull the Navy out of Hawaii because they didn’t vote for him." Olivia Troye, who was Trump's Homeland Security adviser, said “It was shocking and appalling to us to see a president of the United States behaving in this way. Basically if it doesn’t benefit him, he’s not interested." Trump is so cruel, vindictive and petty, he delights in punishing Americans while they're in the midst of dealing with devastating natural disasters — simply because they did not vote for him. He is clearly unfit to lead the nation. Trump's vengeful abuses of power are not the acts of a U.S. president. They are the acts of a tyrant.

[thatstormygeek]

The push is to make gender affirming care bans into the new “Hyde Amendment,” an amendment commonly added to funding bills that bans federal spending on abortion. These amendments would do similarly, banning all federal spending on gender affirming care. These amendments could target everything from Affordable Care Act insurance plans, which fall under the regulation of Health and Human Services, to transgender people in the military, who must get their care through the military. The military would then be banned from providing such care - a defacto trans ban for servicemembers. Collectively, these amendments would seek to enact national anti-trans bans that would reach even people in deep blue states who have fled anti-trans policies in red states.

And yes, there has been an ongoing wave of trans folks fleeing their homes for "safe" states.

My bestie's partner jokingly calls her the "trans-porter" because she's the one their mid-Missouri trans friends come to when they need help getting moved.

Now is an excellent time to tell your Democratic Congress Critters trans Healthcare is important

If you can't safely contact them in person, here are some other options:

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

[thatstormygeek]

But it isn’t worth getting lost in the pedantic details; details that even Trump doesn’t waste time on. What matters here is the overall image he and his coterie wanted to paint: an image constructed by surrounding the doddering, terrified 78-year-old manchild with comic symbols of hypermasculinity (Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White—the latter of whom was last seen drunkenly slapping his wife in a Mexican night club on New Year’s Eve); by Trump kissing the fireman’s uniform of his “fan” killed by a stray bullet at his rally, and wearing the comically oversized ear bandage to remind everyone of his near-brush with death. It is the image of Trump as God-appointed leader, the nation’s savior, and protector against the violent “un-human” hordes. Major media, parroting the Trump team’s pre-spin, had promised for days that the speech would be an exercise in “unity,” reflecting a newfound humility that Trump had allegeldy gained from his brush with assassination last weekend. Racket readers were better prepared: As I argued on Tuesday, Trump’s obvious move would be to follow the example of fascist leaders before him —including Generalissimo Francisco Franco and, yes, Hitler — in claiming that his near-death experience was “proof” that his authority was sanctioned by the divine.

The New York Times tried to “contextualize” Trump’s threats a few days ago, noting that the “costs and hurdles would be enormous.” But this is, again, missing the forest for the pedantic trees. The point isn’t that it would be easy or legal to round up 20 million people, any more than it was going to be easy or possible to “build the wall” during his previous term. It’s that this is the direction he wants to drag the entire country in. And don’t be confused about this: Rounding up 20, or even 10 or 5, million people is a project that will touch every aspect of life in the United States. It will mean checkpoints and random raids at workplaces and in neighborhoods; it will mean mistakes, wrongful detentions and deportations, racial profiling and state violence at an unprecedented scale. I can tell you from having covered past threatened mass expulsions, particularly in the Dominican Republic, that even when the full extent of the government’s threat is not realized, in practice it is an exercise in terror and a virtual carte blanche for violence against the targeted minority, up to and including outright lynching. The Times wrote that “consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic and cost barriers would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Mr. Trump seeks in the span of a four-year presidential term.” But what legal barriers? The Supreme Court just ruled that a president can do whatever he wants, so long as it is an “official act.” And who says Trump — who, again, tried to overthrow an election by force — will allow himself to be limited to just one more four-year term? And I guess, at root, that’s why I and other political observers sat through all 92 minutes of the longest, most rambling, incoherent speech by a major party nominee in televised history. Because if the Democrats, media, and the rest of the supposed pro-democracy opposition don’t get it together and figure out how to stop this immediately, it will be a preview of the next chapter of our lives.

[izooks]

Trump (more) lies

Largest tax cut in history - LIE

Job creation- LIE

Job growth- LIE

Crime - LIE

Migrant crime - LIE

[thatstormygeek]

I wonder what's behind this incessant push to declare loyalty for a candidate in an election still nearly a year away. It's almost like some folks have a vested interest in squashing the only possible leverage people have when trying to get their elected officials to listen.

Vote, y'all. I'm not saying not to (and maybe pay attention to your local elections because you probably have a few in your area this year. I know we do) but declaring you will vote for Biden no matter what in an election that is not until November and demanding others do the same is saying you value your comfort and think it's more important to guard against potential future harm for yourself than to stand up against our government supplying weapons to commit genocide right now.

Standing next to the trolley lever and yelling "vote blue no matter who" at every person you see is doing fuck all to help anyone, on the tracks or no. Especially when some of Team Blue is helping tie folks to the tracks.

You know I used to think "tumblr's absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it's not actually doing any harm".

Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between "guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere" and "guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere" and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.

[purple-dragon]

to everyone who voted for trump:

i hope you get hit with a case of adult acne that never clears up. i hope the only hair ties you find are the shitty rubber bands that rip your hair out. i hope a bird shits on your car every day. i hope you never find your keys in time to leave home. i hope you never have correct change. i hope you always run out of a key ingredient so you can never make what you were planning to cook. i hope every time you try to zip up your clothes, the zippers break. i hope that the next time you drop your phone, it's at the exact angle to make the screen shatter. i hope target is always out of your preferred soap. i hope you stumble over your words at your next important presentation. i hope you drop your toast jam side down. i wish you every possible inconvenience. please have the day you deserve.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

The right-wing propaganda machine’s opportunistic and unhinged response to the wildfires sweeping the Los Angeles area provide an instructive but foreboding look at what the next four years could look like.

Firestorms have swept parts of Los Angeles Country and its environs since Tuesday, as a “perfect storm” of dry conditions (spurred in part by human-caused climate change) and winds gusting over 80 miles per hour sparked apocalyptic conflagrations and severely hampered firefighters’ response.  While the fires are not uniquely large, the fact that they are burning in a densely populated area has resulted in staggering costs — at least ten people are reported dead as of Friday morning, tens of thousands have fled their homes, and more than 9,000 structures are damaged or destroyed, with economic loss estimates in the tens of billions of dollars.  Political leaders would ideally respond to such horrific circumstances by putting aside partisan differences and standing together to help the victims rebuild. But something very different is happening this week in right-wing spaces.

President-elect Donald Trump is lying a lot in order to blame his political opponents for the fire. The president-elect's Truth Social feed this week is alternating between memes highlighting his purported plans to take over Canada and Greenland and falsehood-heavy rants about how “the gross incompetence and mismanagement” of President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are responsible for the fire.  Trump’s MAGA media allies are aiding his effort by turning the right-wing information ecosystem into an unrelenting wave of bogus attacks related to the fires. When any major story breaks, the top priority for the hosts on Fox News, Trumpist social media influencers, and the rest of the echo chamber is to identify scapegoats for their audiences to rage against. 

[...]

As SoCal burns, the right finds false scapegoats

Responding to natural disasters is a core function of government, and leaders’ response to such tragedies deserves careful scrutiny. But the evidence Trump and his allies are pointing to in order to claim that California’s fires stem from liberal mismanagement don’t hold up. The main avenue the right has seized upon — blaming California Democrats and environmentalists for supposedly limiting the water supply used to fight the fire — is entirely false. Trump alleged on Truth Social that there was “no water for fire hydrants” to fight the fire because “Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow” from northern to southern California because he wanted to protect populations of the delta smelt, a rare fish.  His right-wing propagandists quickly parroted his argument to their audiences. On OAN, Dan Ball claimed that “You liberal Democrats running that city, county, and the state have blood on your hands tonight,” before reading Trump’s post. On Fox, Jesse Watters claimed of Newsom that “there is no water coming out of the fire hydrant because this man mismanages the water there.” And Larry Kudlow said on his Fox Business show that the governor “cut the water flow that never got to Southern California, in defense of this obscure fish.” But none of this is true. 

It’s not a water shortage that is impeding the firefighting effort — Southern California’s reservoirs are full, and LA County officials say they filled “all available water storage facility tanks” before the fires started. Some water hydrants ran dry in the Palisades because the extraordinary high demand on the area’s tanks (“four times the normal demand of water was seen for 15 hours straight in the area of the fires”) depleted them faster and reduced the water pressure needed to replenish them.  The long-running dispute over protecting the smelt has nothing to do with the firefighting effort — beyond the fact that there wasn’t a water shortage, that dispute hinges on whether water resources should be used instead for farm irrigation in the South and Central Valley.

And the “water restoration declaration” doesn’t exist, according to Newsom’s staff.  The right regularly responds to disasters by fixating on efforts to hire a diverse workforce, and this case has proved no different. On social media, right-wing influencers targeted Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, claiming her leadership of the department shows that “DEI is quite literally getting people killed,” “DEI = DIE,” and “DEI has deadly consequences.”  Such attacks moved swiftly up the right-wing food chain. “This is the leadership of the LA Fire Department — I sure hope they know what they’re doing,” Fox star Jesse Watters said on Wednesday while shaking his head. He later claimed that “California is committing suicide before our very eyes. DEI is deadly.” 

[...]

The right uses the same playbook after every disaster

The right treats every disaster as an opportunity to attack the left, with talking points bubbling up from the fever swamps or filtering down from Trump, then spreading swiftly through the ecosystem thanks to the all-encompassing nature of its propaganda machine.  We’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly over the last few years, following deadly natural disasters in North Carolina and Puerto Rico and California, among others. 

The right-wing response to the Los Angeles wildfires is what we’ll be seeing during the next four years: Having Donald Trump and right-wing media in sync blaming Trump’s foes for disaster responses.

[houseofbrat]

Mike Johnson might hold on as speaker until 2026. He might.

But I'm beginning to think he won't be in Congress after 2026, which used to be unthinkable for his district.

2026 mid-term election looks like it's going to be a Republican shellacking more and more...

[sotomato06]

[meret118]

IMO, yes. I don't see blue states getting much, if any, federal help. He didn't want to give CA any help in his first term, but his staff persuaded him to do so. There won't be anyone to do that his second term.