O…M…G. I would be humiliated to hand that to someone to ask if they would say what that paragraph means. Trump can’t read.
Did anyone take one for the Teeming Millions and suffer through the SOTU?
Isn’t that tomorrow?
Yeah, I spaced out the date since it’s already Tuesday afternoon now for me.
Oh Gawd, I forgot about that. Is it time for a new Bingo game? Should we start a pool on how much of it will be devoted to how awful the Biden Administration was?
No harm done. But it’s a great opportunity to ask if anybody is willing to take one for the team, and watch it. Is anybody planning to?
I doubt I would be able to stand more than a moment of Trump’s blather but I’ll certainly enjoy watching a panel of MSNBC hosts dunking on it.
I’ll tune in for as long as I can stand it.
Good call from one of my senators.
(It’s also mildly noteworthy that she’s jumped from the All Nazi platform over to Bluesky.)
He’s not just screwing the farmers, he’s spit roasting them, sticking it to them every which way.
Tariffs pushing up the price on their exports in a deliberate effort to make them non-competitive, tariffs on Canadian goods pushing up the price of fertilizer and machinery and electricity.
The gutting of the USDA is going to reduce access loans and grants for things like modernization and conservation and the closing of USDA branch offices is going to make accessing these programs more difficult.
The cuts to USAID and SNAP are bad for farmers who rely on those markets, reduction in NOAA is bad for farmers who rely on accurate weather forecasts and other data to increase crop yield.
So it sucks to be a farmer but hey…….no pronouns!
Also, not all farmers are MAGA, I know some small local farmers who are free-spirited hippie types, and I’m sure they’re not the only ones.
More Fun Stuff from our Commander in Chief:
I imagine that the usual tree-huggers will be out, chaining themselves to trees, spiking trees, and otherwise, doing their thing.
What I hope will also happen is that ordinary people will join them. Not necessarily chaining themselves to trees and spiking trees, but just plain getting in the way, preventing loggers from getting to the forests.
That’s just asking for lots of lawsuits. But then almost all of his XOs are.
Yep, and the Dems only option is employing Trump’s favorite tactics: take it to the courts and delay, delay, delay. In this case, until OrangeAnusFace is dead (hopefully a massive heart attack tonight during the SOTU) or out of office.
Good point. There is the lawfare route, burying Trump and his cronies under hundreds or thousands of lawsuits, so that they are too busy responding to them to pay attention to anything else. RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, Elon Musk, and others should be the targets of every reasonably actionable legal matter that can be come up with.
But there is also the thought I’ve had for a while: that Trump will not survive until the end of his term. In spite of his strongman projection, he’s 78, he’s not physically healthy, he needs help to walk down a ramp, he rides a golf cart while other world leaders walk to a photo op, and he eats pretty much only junk food. His meeting with Zelinsky had me thinking, “Jeez, keep this up, Donnie, and you’re going to bust a blood vessel.” We already know about ketchup-stained walls; how many more of those will the White House and Air Force One endure before Donnie finally busts a blood vessel?
His mental state is, or should be, in question. He’s coming up with a lot of justifications for problems that barely exist or just plain don’t exist. “Canada is a major source of fentanyl!” Um … when less than 2% of fentanyl coming into the US was seized at the Canada border? Facts don’t matter to him, just as they didn’t matter to my father when he was in the grips of dementia: “I never married, I had no wife, I had no kids.” The facts said otherwise, but Dad did not believe them. Trump is the same; the only facts that matter are the ones that he thinks are true.
Then, there is Vance. He seems to me to be slimy and conniving, and waiting to make his move, using the 25th Amendment. US Vice-Presidents are typically in the background, and don’t make a lot of headlines—see, for example, Harris, Pence, Biden, Gore. But Vance’s remarks during the Zelinsky meeting indicated to me that he wants to take a more active role in the Presidency. Trump may think he’s in charge, but if he makes an outrageous mistake (e.g. ordering the National Guard to shoot protesters in the legs), I have no doubt that J.D. will invoke the 25th Amendment, fire all of Trump’s appointees, put in his own, and try to make nice (but not too nice) to keep the House and Senate in 2026.
But I don’t think that Trump will make it through his full four years. Something’s going to happen before 2028, if not 2026.
This will only work to the extent that the executive continues to care about the courts. They have openly stated they don’t intend to do so.
Trying to bury people under lawsuits only works when those people are concerned about the outcome and consequently need to pay attention.
This is part of the Project 2025 agenda. They want everything they do to result in lawsuits so the court system is overwhelmed. They will be the ones to delay, delay. Meanwhile, they keep doing what they want and if someday there are consequences, oh well, the damage is already done, what are you going to do about it.
If a president commits egregious acts in office, the way to remove him is through impeachment. True, under the 25th Amendment, the vice-president and a majority of the cabinet can theoretically declare the president “unable” to serve. However: 1) misconduct or criminality in office does not equal inability to serve, and 2) even if the VP and the cabinet were to take this extraordinary step, the final decision would still lie with Congress.
None of this contradicts your well-founded assertion that JD Vance is a weasel.
Per other replies above, we shouldn’t expect this to be an effective form of resistance. The courts will order the work to stop, and those orders will be ignored, and the trees will continue to come down.
This is not new, though. This has always been his M.O. — a weaponized form of the old “power of positive thinking” tactic. He asserts something is true, based not on its factual basis but its utility and convenience, and he then expects his minions to act as if it’s true and to actualize the truth insofar as it’s possible to do so. If anything has changed, it’s solely in the brazenness of it.