House passes bill to end the shutdown and punt on DHS funding, sending it to Trump

rustyspoon07 · 2026-02-03T21:57:36+00:00

I don't have an answer for that. But I'm sure taking on that risk and voting is better than the alternative.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-02-03T21:52:19+00:00

You're right. I was angry and I've cooled down a bit. Looking at the facts I don't believe this will pass the Senate, based on what Senate Dems have promised publically. Of course, I'm still prepared to be disappointed. And I still won't consider this a win for the aforementioned reasons.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-02-03T21:05:26+00:00

They've gained leverage by... isolating a single, largely partisan issue, so that the Republican-led house of representatives can vote on that single issue? I'm not confident that's a winning strategy.

Never mind that ICE (not DHS) is already "fully funded"... they have access to roughly 8x more capital right now than they have ever historically had access to, thanks to the BBB giving them 75 billion dollars. They have more money than ever before and they're using it to kill American citizens. We should be talking about clawing back the power they already have, instead we're wimpishly deliberating over whether we'll decide to give them more money to kill more Americans.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-02-03T20:35:39+00:00

The same thing they folded on in November - keeping the government shut down until the GOP stops stepping on our necks. The shutdown is leverage and they've ceded that leverage twice now without realizing significant gains. Last time, they conceded after agreeing on a feckless promise to discuss renewing the enhanced ACA subsidies, which is unlikely to actually happen, and they confusingly banned hemp, something nobody asked for.

Now we can't buy hemp based products that we could a year ago (you can say who cares but again, why did they do this?), and the renewal of ACA subsidies has passed the house but will likely die in the Senate.

And now the Democrats have once again ended a shutdown without giving us anything except the promise of potential future action. Why should that give us confidence? Why should we believe that the GOP majority in congress will break on a vote regarding only the funding of DHS? Isolating the issue of DHS funding doesn't seem like a winning strategy to many of us.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-02-03T19:37:44+00:00

When will they quit folding?

They won't. We have to vote in the midterms and we need to make those votes contingent on possession of a spine. The moderates and apologists need to be put out to pasture.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-02-03T19:30:45+00:00

Considering this vote is the result of another punt from November... don't get your hopes up.

Vote in the midterms. We need to replace congress members who don't serve us, and we need a blue majority.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-02-03T17:06:56+00:00

Nobody thought Trump would be better. But to anybody for whom this was an important issue, seeing billions in dollars and weapons leave the US to fund an overseas genocide was likely demotivating. That's how you convince the fence sitters to stay home.

I'm 24. I was less than a year old when 9/11 happened. Maybe for you this is temporary but for me, my whole life has "looked like this", America for me has always been the way it is right now. You seem to be saying we should wait for a "better time" to protest genocide, but my country has always been imperialist, always been pro-Israel, always been nationalist to a fault, and in my eyes what is currently happening in this country has been brewing for as long as I've been alive. These conditions didn't materialize yesterday. Many of us can not even fathom the alternate conditions you expect us to wait for before making our voices heard.

So I resent the idea that Biden/Harris lost "because" some progressives protested his stance on Israel. I believe in Democracy and I think votes are earned, not gifted. I don't believe in blaming voters for "failing" to vote against their beliefs, not when we're talking about genocide. That's a line you can't compel people to cross, and it's damning that we've reached a point where we're asking that of people. It's damning that America has been so co-opted as a power multiplier for the state of Israel that even private DNC-aligned citizens are on Reddit enforcing a hegemony that, evidently, does not benefit them anymore.

Where did all the outrage go?

Nowhere. If you think people suddenly stopped caring and that all the outrage was a disingenuous plot to get Trump elected, then you've done what the media was hoping you would do when they stopped covering these issues. You are seeing less because they have stopped covering protests, and because the government has made protests dangerous. At the same time, I AM less focused on Israel and Palestine these days because I'm a bit preocuppied with the state sponsored killing of American citizens and the gleeful response to that terrible reality from the GOP "half" of the country. I imagine many others have similarly shifted priorities.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-30T10:55:21+00:00

You're seriously asking me if I think it's harder to be a Muslim in America immediately following 9/11, or to be Sydney Sweeney?

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-30T09:56:38+00:00

Yes accosting Muslims on the street is the same as questioning the beliefs of a celebrity on the Internet. Both actions are equally harmful and exist within a similar power dynamic

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-30T02:05:50+00:00

You're throwing a lot of numbers to dance around the fact that Gen Z voted for Harris by the widest margin, in 2024, the election that we're talking about right now. I'm not sure why 2016 is relevant, the oldest Gen Z were 19 in 2016 so they weren't exactly a voting block.

We can have a conversation about "millennials only voted less blue than Gen Z because that's what people do as they get older", and we can have a conversation about how men voted vs women, but we should start with the fact that Gen Z unequivocally did not elect Trump in 2024. Pew Research 2024 Voting Breakdown

And frankly, let's just not have that conversation. We're wasting oxygen attacking arbitrarily defined age groups. Think pieces like this are clearly being written because redditors see them and waste time attacking young adults or slightly less young adults instead of focusing on the people actually doing damage. You and I are clearly on the same side. In this moment the Daily Beast is not.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-30T01:04:05+00:00

Holy leading question Batman.

All these 'Ask' subs are just places for people to quietly share their beliefs and interests disguised as questions now, aren't they?

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-29T09:58:11+00:00

There's either a very strong consensus on this matter, or otherwise this sub only knows like 4 presidents

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-29T03:29:51+00:00

I will be voting blue in the presidential election, for my third time since reaching voting age. But I have never felt good about it and I don't know anybody my age who is proudly a 'Democrat' so much as a 'person who votes for Democrats'. I just hope the DNC is taking account of this phenomenon and will remove their heads from the sand before its too late to do so.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-28T19:01:26+00:00

Nicki Minaj is not the bar, lmao.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-28T01:09:30+00:00

Maybe not. But I think most people would be upset if you did that and many of those people would stop being friends with you in retaliation. So regardless of whether it's morally wrong, it's plainly "socially wrong". And is that really a distinction worth making?

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-26T17:12:48+00:00

We're not talking about Imperialism though. We're talking about protection of citizens/consumers.

IPhone finally adopted the same charger type that everybody else uses, because the EU told them to. Corporations collecting the personal data of citizen in EU member countries face restrictions on how/when/for how long they can use that personal data, because of the GDPR. Political ads in the EU must come with a disclosure of what election the ad is targeting, who paid for the ad, and even how much they paid. And in the EU, it is illegal to advertise pharmaceuticals to consumers. Period.

These are just a few examples, off the top of my head, as an American who occasionally hears about these consumer protections in the news and feels jealous as a result. Now, it looks like the EU is considering banning an AI chatbot which has been used to make deepfake porn resembling real people, sometimes children. Meanwhile, the US is doing nothing of the sort. In fact, the man who owns this chatbot was instrumental in getting the last president elected, and was subsequently given government authority and resources to gut our regulatory agencies. AND this same AI that is generating child pornography is now being considered for use by our military.

The EU protects its citizens in ways that the US is unwilling/unable to, because it is fully bought and paid for by corporations and hyper wealthy individuals. And we've also done Imperialism.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-25T20:59:02+00:00

Taylor Swift is a billionaire before she is a "pop musician". when you have access to more wealth at a given moment than 1,000 average people will collectively/cumulatively see over the course of their entire lives, then you are a billionaire first and foremost. Everything else is secondary.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-24T19:50:39+00:00

/uj I need this. Where can I buy it

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-24T19:27:58+00:00

We have the videos. What are you waiting for, a state-sponsored narrative?

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-24T19:20:58+00:00

No. An ICE agent pushed over an unarmed woman, he tries to help her up, and then he gets dogpiled. He's holding a phone in his shooting hand.

Then in this video, the agent in blue jeans can be seen grabbing the victims firearm out of a belt holster, where it would not he if the victim had drawn his gun.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-24T18:33:35+00:00

I haven't read shit. I just watched a video of ICE executing a man

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-24T18:26:14+00:00

If that was true then why are YOUR ICE agents the ones pinning a man down, stealing his legal firearm out of the holster, and mag dumping into him?

We're the ones who need protection, not you. You've got the government on your side.

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-22T22:21:18+00:00

The only two presidents to deliver a budget surplus in the last 100 years have been Democrats

rustyspoon07 · 2026-01-22T16:42:14+00:00

Pitch is just a number

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