White House yesterday: Liberals have created a delusional fantasy in their heads that we’re supervillains
White House today: We’re defunding the Special Olympics to pay for a racism wall
— Jess Dweck (@TheDweck) March 27, 2019
NEW: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed cutting $51 million from Autism programs and completely eliminating funding for Special Olympics educational programs.
— Travis Akers (@travisakers) March 26, 2019
She’s not running one step ahead of The Hague, like her brother Erik Prince, but don’t underestimate Betsy deVos’s capacity for raw power-thuggery.
Betsy DeVos just announced the Department of Education will end all funding for the @SpecialOlympics under @realDonaldTrump's new budget. https://t.co/2TLi7hzW8D
— Max Burns (@themaxburns) March 26, 2019
DeVos proposes $18 million in cuts to Special Olympics: "We had to make some difficult decisions" https://t.co/Zea0aKIIkl pic.twitter.com/yvmzylobG0
— The Hill (@thehill) March 26, 2019
DeVos wants private charity to make up for the elimination of federal support.
But the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 actually *discourages* charitable giving over prior years. @TaxPolicyCenter lays it out: https://t.co/NBicrf5HHY
— Max Burns (@themaxburns) March 27, 2019
I feel like a running theme of this era will be the costs of protecting people from feeling the consequences of their cruelty. https://t.co/LkhVTXQbPh
— Schooley (@Rschooley) March 27, 2019
Jay
There’s a bottom, right?
JWR
@Jay: God, I hope so. Not keeping my fingers crossed, though. Not with this @#$%^ wrecking crew.
Jay
“Few people are more versed on Russian espionage than Christopher Wylie, who worked for Cambridge Analytica. And Wylie has found reason to find fault with Barr’s apparent exoneration of Trump and his staff.
Wylie tweeted late last night, “Whatever this report says, here’s what I know: when I was at Cambridge Analytica, the company hired known Russian agents, had data researchers in St Petersburg, tested US voter opinion on Putin’s leadership, and hired hackers from Russia – all while Bannon was in charge.”
https://hillreporter.com/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-finds-fault-with-william-barrs-russia-conclusion-28607
opiejeanne
@Jay: I thought there was a bottom but after today, eliminating the Special Olympics funding ($18 million) and cutting the funding for Autism programs, I think they’ve just begun to dig.
They’re really this stupid and evil. They really are.
Manyakitty
There is no bottom with these people. They get worse every day. It’s impossible to predict who and how they’ll target next because most of us aren’t sociopathic monsters.
Jay
@Manyakitty:
The bottom is solient green.
rikyrah
@opiejeanne:
Yes, they ARE that evil??
Jay
Good night all.
Patricia Kayden
The cruelty is the point with this administration so we’re going to see a lot worse. Trump wants to cut the funding to Puerto Rico which is still recovering.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-complains-to-senators-that-puerto-rico-is-getting-too-much-hurricane-relief-funding/2019/03/26/c8c09c30-4fd3-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html?utm_term=.072f560dd4af
No empathy.
OzarkHillbilly
Kill the rich.
Oh yeah, Blech.
sukabi
They are absolutely begging for the return of Madame Guillotine and Mr. Pike.
Mary G
Torches and pitchforks would be too good for these alleged people.
opiejeanne
I am finding this overwhelming and I’m becoming depressed. The suicides, the Barr report, today’s BS and everything else piled on top is just too much. This is the only place I find any solace, and I’m afraid I’m not finding much here. I think it’s fatigue. I feel like I’m in a real-life horror story even though I’m probably safer than most people, but I can see those other people who are going to be destroyed by these monsters before we can stop them. People are going to die and there’s very little we can do, and it will be the fault of these evil people..
The last two years I’ve taken refuge in working in my garden but it’s still a little too cold to do much yet. We rebuilt the tiny old garden shed, turned it into a writing and art room, and that gave me a sense of satisfaction and even though I kept track of the news I was able to disconnect from it part of the time.
I’m not self-destructive, don’t worry, but I need to focus on something else to keep the horror at bay for a while.
Betty Cracker
Waiting for a nasty storm to blow through; it should arrive in the next hour or so. Now that we have a new roof up and an old, half-dead tree that loomed over the house taken down, I can go back to enjoying storms rather than dreading them.
OzarkHillbilly
@opiejeanne:
I am building a “water feature garden” in an awkward PITA postage stamp spot of yard. Going out there and working on it for a few hours every day really helps. And when I go to bed? If a trump thought should intrude? Planning out the next few steps calms my blood pressure and allows my insomniac ass to get at least a little sleep at night.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: I know the feeling, I made a point to get out and head to the mountains. I finally managed to make it to Crystal Lake.
Betty Cracker
@opiejeanne: I understand completely. It is overwhelming and depressing. It is also relentless and exhausting, bearing witness to so much evil, corruption, cruelty and pain.
Sometimes you have to step away, if only for a few hours, to remind yourself that there is still beauty in the world. It’s necessary because you need your energy and strength to oppose the evil, which is every good person’s obligation.
So, find a way to recharge that works for you. We’ll be here. We’ll get through this.
NotMax
@BillinGlendaleCA
Get Jason Voorhees’ autograph?
;)
opiejeanne
@OzarkHillbilly: I have a finished first draft of a novel that needs a rewrite of a couple of key chapters. I can lie awake arguing with myself about how to do it and which characters need to be deleted. The first half is mostly fine but there’s a journey to St Louis that I inserted the main character into and while I’m very pleased with the chapters I’m not sure the girl belongs there at all. I’m trying to decide if I want to scrap it.
I also don’t think there’s enough Confederates getting shot in the book.
opiejeanne
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Beautiful!
I’ll swear there’s a Crystal Lake that I hiked to with my dad a couple of times but I thought we started above Monrovia in a park up in … Duarte canyon maybe? The park where the trail started had a lot of sycamore trees in it and was just a bit higher elevation than I was used to, and at 12 I was wondering why I suddenly couldn’t run any more. But we hiked back in on the trail and it was flat enough that it was mostly just a long walk. About a mile, I think.
Now I’m wondering what the name of that lake was.
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: Thanks Betty. Mostly I bear witness online because I’m usually too tongue-tied to tell people what they need to hear when I confront the idiots in public. I did have that run-in last week with the woman who thought my husband reminded her of Lindsey Graham and then made the mistake of asking if Lindsey Graham was a nice man.
Looking back on the incident I wonder how much of what I said was only in my head and mostly what she heard was incoherent angry fizzing. mr opiejeanne laughed about it later, because he was too astonished by the idiocy of the woman to say anything.
OzarkHillbilly
@opiejeanne:
I used to write short stories and I would run into that issue with sentences/paragraphs. A paragraph could be an absolutely perfect encapsulation of a thought/emotion/place/time/etc, but if it wasn’t moving the story along… Imho, short stories have no room for meanderings.
Also, dead Confederates always improve a story.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: Crystal Lake is above San Gabriel Canyon at about 5500 feet. Not a lot of sycamores up there, but Wikipedia says it was originally called Lake Sycamore. It’s about a mile hike from the general store/cafe to the lake. I didn’t do the hike when I was up there last time due to snow, this time there were only a few patches left.
opiejeanne
@?BillinGlendaleCA: The sycamores were in the park where the trail head is. There was no road from that park up to the lake… and the more I think about it the more I think I’ve confused two different lakes, and I’ve been to both. I don’t remember the store/cafe but I was pretty young when we did that one. I remember getting there and it was disappointing. It was a hot day and the water was very low. I recognize it from your photo. The other not-crystal lake must be up Azusa canyon. Dad’s gone now so I can’t ask him, and my sister never remembers anything from our childhood except that she didn’t like any of my friends because they were my age and didn’t want to play with her because she was two years younger.
opiejeanne
@?BillinGlendaleCA: It’s Monrovia Canyon Park. There’s a trail that leads to a pond under a 30 foot waterfall. The last time I was there, sometime in the early 60s, someone had gotten an old wreck of a car up to the top of the falls and left it there.
ola azul
@opiejeanne:
Must they be shot? Seems kinda limiting. Maybe FSM has got it in for em, too? E.g.:
“And then, on a windless bluebird day, a stalwart live oak that had stood tall for 200 years toppled over onto an entire regiment of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s worst men, skewering all. The sole survivor of this cosmic miracle was a gimlet-eyed bay steed, who archly observed in solemn remembrance: ‘Bark my words, a lone tree hath limned the Forrest and strange fruit shall here be borne no more.'”
And so it goes.
Nelle
@opiejeanne: I say this, having been raised as a Mennonite pacifist. You can never have enough Confederates being shot.
trnc
@Jay:
Maybe, but like goalposts, it seems to keep moving. I’m feeling somewhat lumpy from all the times we’ve hit it.
This move, as so many fiscal moves by the republicans, is a twofer. They get to shovel more money at their own rotten goals, and they know liberals will spend some money to help out the programs being hollowed out rather than on political donations. Sadly, I think the only real counter to that is to yell loudly about the republican move and still spend the money to support the candidates who will get assholes like DeVos the hell away from any govt job.
Just One More Canuck
@Jay: you aren’t aware of the Kicking Puppies and Kittens To Fund Tax Cuts Act of 2019?
Jinchi
Not to worry. They plan on curing autism by banning vaccination.
John S.
@Jinchi:
The fact that people actually believe this is stunning.
As I have told many cretins over the years, Autism is not going to kill my son. The myriad of diseases he might have contracted from not being vaccinated very well could have.
Karen S.
@opiejeanne:
You can always shoot more Confederates. I’d read that book.
Evil Paul
Yeah, we got some similar bullshit happening with Autism funding here in Ontario. Except here the Conservatives are telling us it’s about “saving money.”
Like hell it is.
My Uncle grew up in Northern Ontario in the 1960s when there wasn’t a whole lot of help for special needs kids. He didn’t even get diagnosed with anything formally – he might be on the spectrum or it might be something else. All they could say was that he was “excitable” and academically he was “a bit slow.” The only option available to him was regular school, which he eventually dropped out of. He’s held a bunch of part time jobs over the years but nothing stuck. More and more he’s depending on social assistance (he’s now finally on ODSP from an old knee injury) and living in low income housing that is not well maintained and full of other people with a host of other problems. He’s hard to get along with (I’m one of the only people in the family who can put up with him at all), and he’s had occasional run ins with the law when he gets into loud, public arguments with random people that trigger his anxiety.
Thing is, with the right help, he probably could have been alright. As a kid he could learn things in a low-pressure environment. A few basic supports and he might have been able to hold down a job and take better care of himself (even with all his challenges, he still managed to pay the rent and get by for decades of his life on his own).
These people talking about ‘saving money’ or ‘making tough choices’ or ‘prioritizing national security.’ What they’re really saying is two things: 1) Fuck the dignity and the potential of these kids, and 2) We’re fine with all the other kids (and grandkids) paying for this down the road.
Fuck them.
Mnemosyne
@opiejeanne:
I haven’t been around as much for that selfsame reason. ? No reflecrion on the jackals, I just needed a mental health break.
CaseyL
@opiejeanne: Do you watch the news? If you do, stop. Better yet, just don’t turn on the TV at all. I haven’t watched TV regularly in years – there are a few shows I try to catch, mostly On Demand – and make a point of not watching TV news.
I still hear about the shit going on, but indirectly. On-line mostly. It seems more distant. I’m still filled with rage most of the time, but more in a background noise kind of way.
Ruckus
@opiejeanne:
It is intentional.
They want you to be discouraged, to be fatigued.
They want you to not vote, to not do anything, let alone what you can do about them.
They have limited time before they go too far, because they have no idea about history, about how the country is supposed to work.
They have supporters, which is disparaging because we see them as monsters.
They can be stopped. Not easily, we give people power who abuse it and wonder why they do. They do this because they are exactly who we think they are.
We have to work through our system, to restore it, to hound them on every level.
We have to define what we want out of life, and it shouldn’t just be money.
We have to fix the issues, which can be done. We will never end racism but we can make it a lot less appealing to many people. Time is the biggest issue. We have to fix before it all gets burned down. And if we don’t fix it, make it better, someone will burn it down. That’s what always happens when people go too far. Violence and destruction. Since the dawn of time, that is what always happens. This time will be no different. We have time and most of the youth on our side to make changes. The morons targeting the youth made a big mistake.
Ohio Mom
@opiejeanne: I hear you — I feel that way too much of the time.
Although I must admit getting a little mean pleasure out of the news about the Special Olympics news.
I am surrounded by solid Republican special needs parents here in Red suburbia, many deeply involved in Special Olympics, all of whom are convinced (real quote I’ve heard many times) “They wouldn’t do anything to *our* kids.” They never specify who “they” is.
So entitled! Maybe the threat to Special Olympics will pierce their thick skulls.
Then I sigh and think, Nah, Democrats and a handful of Republicans looking to burnish their moderate credentials will save the day and my neighbors will go back to their self-satisfied conviction they are more deserving than anyone else.
But I intend to relish every bit of their squirming in the mean time.
West of the Rockies
I don’t wish to appearance-shame, but DeVos looks… Off. Like she’s made of rubber. How does someone look dry (moisture-free) in a photo? She creeps me out.
Now, as for her vile policies…