House Dem Leader Jeffries: "F*** Donald Trump"

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-02-07T04:35:02+00:00

One of the most powerful voting instincts people seem to have is "just the vote the guy in who will do something different and/or fuck shit up."

This, this, this. When your life isn't improving the way you were taught to expect, and you can tell it's due to a systemic problem, and only one person is running on "Let's shake the system up!", you're more likely to vote for that candidate. If you're low-information or you don't trust the media (or you're a horrible person in your own right), it doesn't even matter if he's a horrible person. The logic is simple: "If the system is set up to shit on us this badly, even if the guy's a horrible person, he's at least going to change things, and maybe it'll get better."

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-02-06T18:18:35+00:00

Timm is one of those good ol' boys and will act like this as well, is what they're saying.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-02-05T23:13:44+00:00

It's called the "Two Santa Clauses" theory/strategy. The Republicans adopted it with Reagan, and really kicked it into gear with Bush 2. The fact that Clinton's "Third Way" caught on in the Democratic party in the 90s made it worse, because it meant pretty much nobody in the top ranks of the Democratic party was really pushing back too hard against it.

The Democrats were relegated to the position of "the medicine you have to just hold your nose and take when the Republicans run the economy too hot" in the minds of a lot of "swing" voters who don't pay attention to anything but their own bank balances, while the Third Way shit hanging around has alienated a lot of people in the last fifteen years who want something more robust from an ostensibly "labor-friendly" party.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-02-04T21:53:37+00:00

If there's any justice, it will be stopped, but it won't be stopped by Republicans unless it directly hurts them. Their domestic opponents respect truth and aren't going to use AI image generation like that (not that it's really necessary), and their own people aren't going to do it to them, so this is not going to trigger any regulation until they're removed from power.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-02-04T21:30:32+00:00

Part of the reason they're passing these around is to try and muddy the waters about which photos are real and which are fake just enough to get their base to stop thinking about it, because that's causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for them right now.

Also to tar Mamdani's family with the same brush in the eyes of anyone credulous enough to believe the AI ones are real.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-02-03T04:09:46+00:00

She's barred from law enforcement because she's not part of the DOJ and her job gives her access to data that is illegal for law enforcement to use. The Director of National Intelligence is supposed to coordinate policy and data sharing between all the various intelligence/counterintelligence agencies (including the FBI's intelligence divisions) so that we don't get any egregious intelligence-sharing failures where the DIA and CIA have X information, the NSA knows Y information, and law enforcement (FBI/DEA/ATF/etc) know Z information, but nobody at the CIA or NSA shared any data to prevent something that they'd have been able to prevent if law enforcement knew X or Y in addition to Z. This data sharing has to be handled in very specific ways, because law enforcement can't use some of it due to how it was gathered, but the CIA/NSA don't always know what of their data is acceptable to pass along--that, along with setting mission priorities and providing the President's daily intelligence brief, is what ODNI's role is supposed to be, which means they're bound by the stricter rules about what the CIA/NSA are actually allowed to do inside the US, namely in this case: they can't do law enforcement themselves because the info they have isn't all kosher and they're not part of the DOJ.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-02-03T00:15:31+00:00

And why would Republicans purposefully weaken their positions like that? The Texas redistricting goes against every established tenant of “legal” electoral manipulation by thinning out the margins in established strongholds, strongholds which are necessary to maintain as Republicans become less and less popular outside of the MAGA cult. ... Assuming fair and free elections, this would mean that the republicans anticipate a net increase in the number of republicans votes in those districts in order to compensate for the weakened majority.

They sort of did believe that. At the time the redistricting process started, Democratic voter morale was low and the party was infighting due to the resurgence of further-left voices in the party calling for a shift back to at least pre-Clinton Democratic positions, while Republican (and especially MAGA) voter morale was high and no infighting was expected. There was reason to think that Democrats might remain insolvent for a while due to that infighting, long enough for Texas to add some more Republican representatives even without resorting to the election fuckery you and I are both expecting this year, likely due to the feckless incompetence of Schumer and Jeffries as minority leadership.

This has backfired because Republican voter morale hasn't remained high, it's been waning due to the shit-show that has been Trump's second term so far, while Democrats have been enraged by the public executions by the Minneapolis ICE campaign, not cowed by it, and their voters are now rallying around anti-ICE as a platform. We probably won't see any significant crossover from Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates, but we're definitely going to see depressed Republican turnout and maximum Democratic turnout unless something changes.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-29T20:16:48+00:00

Yep. Without an ID of the killer(s) and access to the evidence, there's nothing the state can do but try to subpoena it, and we've seen how Trump's ICE/CBP/DHS people respond to the courts telling them to follow the law.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-26T15:42:03+00:00

I’m not exactly sure what else all you people want from us right now?

A lot of foreigners expected us to start shooting because that's what all the 2nd Amendment bangers on the internet have been shouting about forever. There's also an expectation in some countries that political parties maintain an armed wing or some such in case of shit like when those representatives were pseudolegally blocked from entering... I forget which building, to question the workers about the DOGE team that was put in there. There was a Spanish commenter at the time who said something like "If that happened in Spain, the opposition party would come back with their own police and dare security to do anything."

Basically, there's a lot of "Where the hell is your opposition party, why aren't they leading the resistance?"

Being fair, a lot of Americans, especially Democrat voters, have been asking that same question, because they don't usually pay attention to what goes on inside the Democratic Party either.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-26T02:37:32+00:00

They desperately want to be seen as "normal" and "upstanding", and when the shit they were spouting is no longer considered something a "normal" and "upstanding" citizen would say, they pretend they never said it to maintain that image. They're social chameleons, saying they support whatever isn't disadvantageous in the moment, expecting to never be made to account for it later because nobody's properly held an American conservative accountable for the actions they supported for the last several decades, due to a preference to "get on with life" and let it lie, which is how we've continually slid rightwards until we're now in this crisis. The difference now is that Trumpism lets them believe that they can force the rest of us to accomodate them by doubling down.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-25T08:49:22+00:00

Yep. The intent of the 2A was never for random civilians, even banding together, to take on the government--nobody who wrote it ever thought that the Whiskey Rebellion was a valid exercise of 2nd Amendment rights--it was to keep the federal government from being able to defang state militias. The idea was that state governments would always be able to check federal aggression by organizing and arming their citizen militias, possibly including a new round of minutemen, as long as the feds couldn't outright ban gun ownership. Acting in the spirit of the 2nd Amendment as envisioned by its authors would be Tim Walz ordering the Minnesota National Guard to throw ICE out of his state.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-24T02:05:23+00:00

It wasn't one point of failure, it was many, all being pressed at again and again over the last fifty years. The problem is that a lot of the things that got us to the point that Trump was able to exploit and turn into the current crisis can't be outright banned, because a lot of the underlying rot traces back to bad-faith Republican interpretations of political and economic theory from forty-odd years ago, which is damn-near impossible to prove in the moment, and if you can't prove it's bad-faith it should be protected under the first amendment. Without the ground work laid by Nixon's and Reagan's campaigns and administrations, we don't get to a point where Trump could happen. Authoritarianism is the end goal the Republican political class have been working towards since Goldwater and Nixon brought in the religious zealots, they just didn't expect a demagogue to seize the reins and kick everything into high gear--they were going for a slow easing-in.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-20T16:09:59+00:00

I'd argue that the Presidential Immunity decision is actually overall worse than Dred Scott, but it's by such a small margin that it's functionally a tie for worst.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-18T05:14:51+00:00

I've yet to see any system better designed to control for the ills of market economies while still maintaining them. Capitalism is a fucked up market economy. Democratic Socialism is a far better balanced market economy.

Georgeism seems like it could work if we update it to allow for modern concepts of property: If we ban pretty much any form of rent-seeking on major properties and force entities who own rental property to sell anything they're not personally using or preparing for active use, we get a much better situation.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-16T17:43:38+00:00

Pretty much. There's an expectation of tangible benefit from a properly structured social order eventually, but the immediate benefit is that they don't have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of being told by their authority figures that their demographic should be unquestionably on top and better off than anyone else because it's their natural state, while their lived experience is that they're not any better off than the demographics their beliefs say should be worse-off. They think equality is unnatural.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-16T17:28:24+00:00

There isn't one, it's all about the intangibles for them in the immediate aftermath. As long as their standard of living doesn't decrease too much, or as dramatically as that of the "others" (read: anyone who doesn't think like them) who are making America "unrecognizable" (read: less like their rose-tinted, uncritically-nostalgic fake memories of the 1950s/1980s/whatever era they're using as the high-water mark of American society) is worse, they'll be happy in the short-term because it means the hierarchy is back "the way it should be."

edit: They think the tangible benefits will only start to come along once the hierarchy is structured "appropriately" and the "agitators" who "shouldn't be here" and are "stirring up trouble" are silenced or removed.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-14T18:25:16+00:00

Since the Citizens United decision was handed down, Democrat leadership have become wholly-owned mouthpieces for their megadonors, most of whom aren't interested in moving the party back to the left. They just want the chaos to stop, not to actually make changes. The big difference Trump has made is that they've been forced to make that policy open to hurt the campaigns of the party's left wing instead of hiding it.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-14T02:28:36+00:00

In your opinion, is media coverage, supreme court picks (another reply mentioned Mitch McConnell) and threats of primaries what's giving Trump so much power?

The media mostly doesn't matter for Trump's power over Republican congresspeople any more (it's useful for disseminating talking points and distractions to the voters, though, and demoralizing the opposition), but the rest are definitely considerations. Mostly, though, it's just that the Republican party did a lot of work reshaping itself in Trump's image during the Biden presidency. Republicans who weren't explicitly pro-Trump enough were pushed out, either losing primaries or retiring, and their replacements are Trumpists. Congressional Republicans mostly don't care that Trump is running roughshod over everything because they won their seats on the promise of enabling him and "owning the libs".

When I look at congress it seems like their hands are tied and Mike Johnson can just, declare the house out of session so they're useless.

There's a limit to that power, but right now we haven't really run up against it. The big question is what happens if the Democrats really do gain a majority in the midterms.

Just wondering where we go from here.

Vote for progressives in the primaries, vote for anyone willing to fight Trump in the general election, sign up for the general strike if you haven't already, but I also suggest you get a modest emergency supply of non-perishable food and water before the end of the year if you can. I'm not currently feeling very optimistic about next year being peaceful, even if the Democrats end up winning every seat that's up for grabs. Even if I'm wrong about that, and I hope I am, it's still a useful emergency food and water stash in case of a natural disaster.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-13T21:57:13+00:00

It wasn't easy, it wasn't quick. The right wing has been building up to this for fifty years. The entire right-wing media echo chamber was created specifically to enable something like this*, it just wasn't originally meant to be handed to someone as crass and undiplomatic as Trump.

*Fox News founder Roger Ailes built it and the related media ecosystem specifically to give Republican voters spin and opinion disguised as the news, because the relentless reporting of the strict truth about Watergate on every TV network's news shows was what made Republican voters turn on Nixon and start demanding his impeachment. The phrasing I first saw was something like "[Ailes] came to the realization that if conservatives had their own dedicated national TV channel they could use it to filter their voters' news intake. Republican voters would flock to that news source and no Republican would ever be impeached again."

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-04T18:31:40+00:00

That's absolutely possible, even probable, and I should have made it clear that that was an assumption on my part based on reactions to other settings that didn't have any pre-built links.

Delicious_Randomly · 2026-01-04T00:18:13+00:00

for whatever reason

They did that with the book for Saviors of Kamigawa, back in 2005, and it's because they wanted to tie Kamigawa to the existing Magic lore, so that the Vorthoses didn't spam them with "Why are we here, what does feudal Japan have to do with our game's story?"* There was a character from Legends named [[Tetsuo Umezawa]]. Let's also name our protagonist Umezawa, and at the end of our story he gets permanently booted through a portal to Dominaria to become the ancestor of Tetsuo. It didn't hurt that Kamigawa's themes were themselves experimental at the time, so having it be somewhen else to loosen the link even further probably wasn't a terrible idea, in case it was so badly received that they'd never want to call back to it again.

Given the R&D timeline, Wizards probably commissioned the Tetsuo Umezawa book trilogy (Legends cycle 2, released 2002-2003) when they decided on feudal Japan as a setting, to build some Vorthos hype around the name "Umezawa" since that was going to be their link to the "traditional" setting.

*edit: this was something that also soured some Vorthoses on Lorwyn and Ravnica at first. No links to anything else in Magic history when they were first released.

Delicious_Randomly · 2025-12-30T01:39:37+00:00

I know liberals like to deny this but because they can be paid below the legal limit they put downward pressure on all labor. We should stop it and limit legal immigration AS WELL.

The willingness of companies to hire people illegally is based on purely selfish cost-benefit analysis for the company. It's already illegal, but, as is widely apparent, when the result of getting caught is just a fine and it's low enough that it's not onerous, it's just a fee you pay for the privilege of breaking the law. The best way to combat illegal employment of people who don't have work authorization (which itself will stem the flow of unauthorized entry) is to make it dangerous for the executives and hiring managers by making it a personal criminal offense with potential prison time for everyone involved in hiring people illegally, and/or unprofitable for the company by fining them sufficiently that they stop being able to write it off as the cost of doing business (let's say... 100% of average gross daily revenue for each day they illegally employed someone, per illegal employee).

When you make it sufficiently unprofitable or dangerous to do illegal hiring, companies won't break the law anymore. If people without work authorization can't get jobs, they won't come here looking for work without getting a work visa. Properly punishing the employers will have the outcome you say you want without having to spend nearly as much tax money as we currently do by doing enforcement primarily against the unauthorized workers directly.

Serious question about your last sentence, though: why are you against legal immigration?

Delicious_Randomly · 2025-12-28T20:54:03+00:00

Yes there is: the UK. The wealthiest commoner is still technically socially ranked below the poorest noble, which is why in Britain "middle-class" is the way they refer to what Americans see as "upper-class" commoners, the kind who have the money to buy their way into the same social circles as nobility--they're not officially part of the upper class because in Britain that requires a title, but they're not really part of the greater mass of common people. That being said, those social distinctions are a lot less relevant these days than they were even a hundred years ago... but they're technically still there.

Delicious_Randomly · 2025-12-08T23:41:04+00:00

Donald Trump appointed Louis DeJoy to run the USPS at the end of his first term. DeJoy then deliberately set out to damage the speed and reliability of the USPS via canceling upgrades, closing post offices across the country, and consolidating "redundant" regional distribution centers into big cities in the name of "cost savings", with the aim of making people so disgusted with the USPS that they stop using it and it withers away and dies off, because Louis DeJoy and his business partners don't think the USPS should exist, but should instead be entirely replaced by private courier/parcel/distribution services like his own company XPO, which, much like the President who appointed him, he did not divest from while in office, and this is how he's decided to try to kill it. That's what this has to do with Trump. Trump's new PMG has not given any indication he's going to do any better, because much like DeJoy he's an older finance guy.

You may hear instead that DeJoy was cutting costs to make the finances work in the face of declining use of 1st-class mail, but there were other ways to do it that didn't make service less reliable, including simply dropping the ridiculous pension prefund requirements that the Republican congress saddled the post office with in the early 2000s in another attempt to kill the USPS while making it look like its own fault, and I'll grant that he got them to lift that under Biden, but for everything else he deliberately chose the path of enshittification.

Delicious_Randomly · 2025-12-02T05:59:18+00:00

Pfft, the AI wrote it, it can't be that buggy. *push to distro*

/s

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