Jeffries: "Every single one of the signatories voted for a House bill that undermined the clean energy economy, noted that it would hurt their own constituents, voted for the bill anyway, and the begged the Senate to make it different. That's not how we should be legislating in the US House."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 3, 2025 at 9:59 AM
===
Jeffries says he "still has a lot to say" (it's pretty clear he's going for the record for longest Magic Minute speech)
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 3, 2025 at 10:09 AM
===
But the NYTimes genuinely admires the Felon-in-Office’s savvy…
As Shawn McCreesh and Tyler Pager report, House Republican holdouts were apparently swayed to support President Trump’s tax and spending bill by signed merch and photographs with the president.
— David Gura (@davidgura.bsky.social) July 3, 2025 at 8:03 AM
===
It's a sacrifice I'm sure they'd make again.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) July 3, 2025 at 9:56 AM
===
More seriously: I'd guess they actually didn't have the votes and it was pretty unsure, but the entire thing became necessary as various reps realized there wasn't an alternative.
Long term, this probably breaks the current caucus. It's already forced multiple retirements.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) July 3, 2025 at 10:02 AM
===
Trump can't even remember what's in the bill these maroons think he's gonna remember what they want him to impound
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) July 3, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Phylllis
It’s also the playbook for the education funds being withheld. While Congress has the power of the purse, they do not have access to the financial apparatus to actually transfer the funds to the states. Congress can, and should, be vehemently demanding the funds not be held up, but ultimately, Vought, Bessent, McMahon et al don’t care. It’s not like Congress has a mechanism to physically force the transfer of funds.
Kirk
All of this shitshow stands out, but you’ve caught the one that floors me the most.
“We’ll pass this if you promise to ignore these parts.”
The rule of law has been cut flat, and we shall all find out what happens when the Devil turns ’round.
PsiFighter37
There better be hell to pay in next year’s elections for this. People need to get angry and stay angry.
trollhattan
Guess my new concern is what all the dead-enders do now that they have their shiny new Trump Shovels™.
“We’re in this deep, deep hole, we all have cool new gold shovels, is there really any question?
Geo Wilcox
What utter morons.
trollhattan
@PsiFighter37: Have you seen the attention span of America?
Even Trump understands that to make us forget about this turducken, he has to distract us with fresh new horrors. And that’s a Donny specialty.
WTFGhost
You know, signed merch is valueless when some moron scrawls his signature on everything, and it’s not like his signature couldn’t be photoshopped on later.
Remember, this orange turd signed pictures of children murdered by “migrant crime.” It’s a shame those beautiful, golden, children weren’t killed by a US citizen, because then it wouldn’t matter, eh, donnie boy?
Another Scott
@Phylllis: Congress can impeach and remove government officials.
Congress.gov:
Other is pretty broad and surely includes open defiance of Congress.
The basic problem is that, as we all know, the GQP and their enablers and hangers-on don’t care about the law and regulations and norms. They only care about power. Until they are removed from office, they’ll keep doing these monstrous things.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Geminid
@trollhattan: People paid attention in the 2018 midterms, enough attention for Democrats to gain 40 House seats.
WTFGhost
@trollhattan: AHEM.
A turducken ends up with useful, tasty, meat.
What Republicans have is a dumpster, full of pet (and human) waste, on fire, that splashed toxic waste over top of the radioactive waste, instead of the water that normally soaks up the neutrons from radioactivity. Said toxic waste being heavily concentrated (the better to poison water tables), it has little water, and is chemically active, so, those neutrons kick it into overdrive.
The result is radioactive, toxic, and smells like burning poop and ammonia, while also being extraordinarily bad for the health.
It might have started out as a turducken, but then Republicans got a hold of it.
JML
@WTFGhost: You know, it used to be that when you wanted to buy off a member of Congress you had to at least include a new bridge or highway project for their district. Not only is the GOP Congress made up of twisted, evil, feckless swine they’re also a cheap date.
Even Menendez got actual gold bars.
Phylllis
@Another Scott: That’s true. They could put a stop to all this today. But they’re not going to. Because the leopards probably won’t eat their face.
gene108
@PsiFighter37:
People neeed to get mad and stay mad at this shit for another 20 years or nothing is going to change for the better.
After every loss Republicans become more radically conservative right-wing reactionaries, and have been rewarded for it.
gene108
@Another Scott:
Since there aren’t 67 Democrats in the Senate, and Senate Republicans will never vote to convict Trump, what is the point of impeachment?
The most powerful tool Congress has to check a wayward president has been rendered useless because of partisanship over all other considerations.
The power of right wing propaganda keeps Republicans in line, and keeps enough of the public supporting Republicans to prevent a backlash.
Professor Bigfoot
@Kirk: Sir Thomas More and Martin Niemöller nod, mournfully.
Belafon
@PsiFighter37: People are going to have to feel it. They’re not going to respond to “It’s a bad bill.”
Splitting Image
@PsiFighter37:
They’ll have time for another reconciliation bill between now and then, which they can use to gut Medicare and Social Security.
japa21
@Belafon: Only partially agree. A lot of people responded to lies about the ACA. They never did feel the pain. Depends on how the message is delivered, and more particularly, who does the delivery.
tobie
I hope Hakeem Jeffries can keep this speech going through the night. Will folks register it as they did Cory Booker’s longest ever filibuster? I dunno. There’s a lot of opposition to Jeffries on the left…some deserved, some not.
Another Scott
@gene108: All true.
But things don’t change until they do.
Our job is to do what we can to start changing things.
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
ExPatExDem
It’s sad and it sucks, but did anyone expect that they’d do anything but fall in line in the end?
MobiusKlein
Why would any R trust Trump that the promised recissions will happen the way the agreement suggested. And are any of these agreements written?
And isn’t writing down the agreement the entire f’ing point of lawmaking? If one dude can change the laws as they wish, it’s called a dictatorship.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Scott: And I think it benefits us to keep putting the GOP on the record as supporting all of this shit.
Another Scott
@MobiusKlein: 47 doesn’t care if things are written down. He broke his own USMCA trade agreements, for crying out loud.
So far, he hasn’t seen any consequences, so he’ll just keep going…
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Melancholy Jaques
One thing the Republicans know and use to their advantage: the voters who vote for them – the hard core as well as the normies who swing their way – do not connect their votes with things that Republicans actually do when in power.
Belafon
@japa21: I guess I should narrow it down: The people who think Republicans aren’t out to hurt them are going to have to feel it. This group includes the third of the population that doesn’t think politics affects them as well as the Republican percentage.
Old Man Shadow
@Geminid: “Accidentally” arrest and imprison all the American Latino voters and whoopsie, I guess you’ll have to try again next election.
JCJ
@PsiFighter37: The problem is that many white people are still angry about 2008. The Onion got it right in 2012 when following Obama’s re-election they had a report that the leading candidate for the Republicans in 2016 was a white hot ball of rage. Unfortunately that ball has not yet cooled.
tobie
@Melancholy Jaques: My guess is that the one thing that will unnerve Republican voters are disease outbreaks in schools. Seeing young people in hospital beds will disturb them. Nothing else will break through.
Chief Oshkosh
@gene108: This is a little too black-and-white.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression have created a situation where voters overall can’t properly punish bad representation.
Similarly, capture of the courts is both a result of and a cause of this. Arguably Citizens United is still “rewarding” the GOP, and will for some time.
Non-violent solution? Each person must keep pushing back. There’s a saying in racing: “You have to go as fast as you can, no matter how slow that is.”
That’s where we are. Having raced slow cars and having been in the “slow” party all of my my adult life, I know it sucks.
I guess another non-violent solution is, if you have enough money and no real ties, just leave the US and set up home in France. Or Thailand. Or…
But fuck ’em. I paid my entry fee and a bunch of shitbirds aren’t going to get me to leave the track early.
NotMax
Someone needs to pen new lyrics to Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.
Big Bad Fugly Bill.
;)
Tim C
@gene108: Part of this is also because of how effective Democrats have been at fixing things.
Clinton takes over from Bush I, economy booms, deficit gets zeroed out. So now that it’s fixed, time for Bush II to give away all the goodies!
Bush crashes the economy and loses a totally stupid war in Iraq, so Obama comes in, Things settle down, economy recovers, Osama Bin Laden is eliminated deficit gets smaller…. so now time for Trump I
Trump is somewhat constrained by Republican establishment, blows up deficit, embarrasses himself regularly, and manages to break laws and totally mishandle the pandemic. So Biden comes in and fixes it, Pandemic ends, difficult end to the forever war in Afghanistan, low unemployment, deficit getting better…. and crash and burn on Trump II now that all the guardrails are gone.
We need to find a way to break this cycle, sadly the pain has to get brutal to reach the cult. This bill might be enough.
sab
Trump doesn’t know what is in the bill, but his minions do and they will remember forever who objected to what they put in it.
Phylllis
@tobie: Hopefully not to that dire an extent. It’ll hit real soon when the kiddoes start school in a month & there’s no afterschool program for them to attend until parents get off from work.
WTFGhost
@Another Scott: Technically, he does care. He despises people who write things down. Did you ever see that scene from (I hope) The Wire, “(Is?/Are) you taking notes? On a criminal fucking conspiracy?” That’s how Trump feels about people writing things down.
And, in all seriousness, if the President was known to have a duty to see the law faithfully executed, every piece of paper the President touches, that deals in the most remote way on his job, is supposed to go into the national archive. The “problem” is, of course, there are no criminal penalties for the Presidential Records Act, so Trump feels safe completely ignoring it.
Man, was he pissed when they started asking for classified documents from “his” boxes, and started mentioning criminal charges! That wasn’t supposed to happen! I bet he was on the phone with Roberts, screaming and throwing ketchup. (Very few people can effectively fling ketchup through the phone – it takes some really photorealistic video conferencing. But when you’re President, things happen.)
sab
@Chief Oshkosh: Thank you. Sadly cheering words to remember.
I follow Black folks. Took several hundred years, and every two steps forward has one step back but still we improve.
SW
The bad thing happened last November. This is just one of the consequences of the bad thing. Without consequences there will be no change.
They Call Me Noni
I have had enough of the horrors for today, or at least for the next few hours. The basil in my pots on the deck have grown tall so I’m going to put an Andrea Bocelli CD on and make pesto and then seafood salad. And even though it’s not quite noon I may have a glass of pinot grigio. If ever there were a day to drink before 5 today is it.
Right now I want to stand on my deck and scream at the top of my lungs “fuck Trump and fuck you for voting for him” as we are surrounded by the sumbitches. I won’t but I really want to. I’ll probably just cry.
Steve LaBonne
@Tim C: The problem is that this time the damage will be so severe that it simply can’t be fixed in a politically meaningful amount of time, especially because the administrative capabilities of the government have already been crippled. And the economic damage involves intractable, long-term damage from things like crippling debt and the destruction of scientific research. I fear we have already run that cycle once too often.
NotMax
@Phylllis
“Our great-grandparents played unsupervised in the gutter, why can’t they?”
//
Hungry Joe
If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that I don’t understand squat. I was sure the end of Roe would generate that to-be-reaped whirlwind. Then I just KNEW that the whirlwind would be Kamala Harris, demolishing that deranged orange cartoon. These days I haven’t given up hope, but I’ve given up acting like I really know much of anything.
Instead: Head down, keep plugging away. Ms. Joe and I worked on the campaign to elect Paloma Aguirre to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. I wrote postcards, she phone banked. The election was Tuesday.The winner would be the swing vote on the five-member Board. Her opponent: MAGA.
Aguirre won. It’s a start.
WTFGhost
@NotMax:
On the south side of the Capitol, in the fugly part of the hill, and if you down there, you better just beware of the big bad fugly bill.
It was bad, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the capitol hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
(Come on, folks, this could go viral if we get it just right.)
Another Scott
@sab: Kind of a category error, IMHO.
47 doesn’t care about the details of what’s in the bill. He’ll make up stuff to say about it – “You just tell them and they believe – they just do.”
He wants to claim a big win, want the GQP to continue to bend to his demands, wants a big tax cut, wants to punch down, wants to define the news, and wants to punish his enemies. This bill is part of that, but the details don’t matter to him.
He’ll keep claiming to be the world’s greatest peacemaker, the world’s greatest trade dealmaker, the US’s most popular politician, the world’s healthiest and most beautiful person with the greatest stable genius brain.
So, it’s not that he doesn’t know – he does not care. Reality doesn’t matter. Whatever happens, it’s not going to affect his golf schedule or his grifting or his demand to be in the news for some new abomination every 2-3 days.
Might as well ask the oak tree in your yard about what’s in the bill…
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Shalimar
Donald Trump in pictures outdoors with that hat and the wild hair in back has looked a lot more lately like my dad in the last few years of his life. He died at 90. It seems like the last year or so Trump has stopped giving a crap about trying to look younger.
JML
@Hungry Joe: Good for you. I’m trying to help one of my friends from law school run for City Council. (she’ll be great at it) every step matters.
right?
Phylllis
@NotMax: Hell, I played unsupervised in the gutter. I’m not great-grandparent old, but I am old-ish.
taumaturgo
@gene108: Excellent observation, but where is the opposing party promising to change the rules that perpetuate the conditions you presented. The current democratic gerontocracy, no matter how many speeches they give, is failing to meet this moment because the base hasn’t held them accountable.
The ultimate in unaccountability is losing two elections to the worst candidate in history and continuing to hold the position of party leadership.
Baud
@taumaturgo:
Trump is an excellent candidate. It’s the populace that’s terrible.
Phylllis
@taumaturgo: I had lunch with a friend Tuesday & she was asking me how I came to my decision about retiring. I told her I could tell it was taking me longer at work to finish routine tasks, and to switch gears mentally from differing tasks, and I’m in my early 60’s. After watching Murkowski’s fugue state episode the other day, I found myself thinking most of these people are just too damn old and out of touch to be doing the job.
Baud
@SW:
Agree. Too many people are still addicted to putting the blame elsewhere rather than actually having to take on the Republican party and risk loss of social status.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: More than half of our populace reads below 6th grade level. And it shows.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
I don’t believe lack of education necessarily leads to lack of scruples, or that education necessarily leads to one having a moral core.
Education only helps somewhat when it comes to processing information IMHO.
Tim C
@Steve LaBonne: Oh, 100% agree. Not only that, it will be at least 3 1/2 years of more and more damage coming.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: This! Also many tankies see this as an opportunity for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: It leads to people not understanding or even knowing about things that they might well disapprove of if they did understand. But it also leads to fear of people and ideas that they don’t encounter in everyday life, which makes them ideal recipients of reactionary propaganda. Conservative leaders understand these things, hence their war on education.
Aziz, light!
@Steve LaBonne: More than half of our populace reads?
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
This is an opportunity for them. Trump will burn everything down in service of billionaires. If the left can’t win over voters in this situation, I don’t know when they’ll be able to.
Steve LaBonne
@Aziz, light!: Good point.
WTFGhost
@WTFGhost: Okay, I revamped the first verse, because I misremembered the song. So far:
The Ballad of Don Shitzinpantz:
On the south side of the Capitol, it’s the fugly part of the hill,
and if you go down there, you better just beware of the big bad fugly bill.
Shitizpants was a liar, see he said he stood six foot three.
Those capitol girls call him shorty toadstool but the men just call him a fool.
It was bad, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the capitol hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
Now Donnie he a baldie and big combover, crass
And he hates to stand out in the rain, where his skull shows like his ass!
He got some bad boy Secret Service
He got the federal cops, by chance
He needs those boys, as distractory toys, whenever he shits his pants!
(chorus)
Can anyone help with Don demanding the bill? It’s a bit too much fun scanning crude insults, so the segue is difficult.
taumaturgo
@Baud: Did democrats have a bad script, bad actors, or both?
sab
@Steve LaBonne: I never read our guys in my pie filter.
NotMax
@WTFGhost
Far from my best work (dashed it off in all of five minutes, but perhaps can serve as an example).
If you head on down to Congress
There’s something in the air
Republicans start
With a shriveled heart
To pass a bill unfair
.
It’s the big, bad fugly bill
Worst damn bill on Capitol hill
Badder than curdled milk
Meanest bill of its ilk
;)
Baud
@taumaturgo:
Neither. The voters were just too right wing for us. Political parties sometimes lose elections because voters want something other than what the party is offering.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@taumaturgo: to busy worrying about using word wrong, as witnessed by them stopping Waltz calling Trump and Vance weird. The MSM certainly isn’t going to call out Trump and Vance on that, and our own politicians aren’t allowed too because of our own self anointed langue police. Then we run around and scream “how does Trump get away with it?”.
Geminid
@taumaturgo:
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader speaking now, is 54 years-old.
Baud
Omnes Omnibus
How many worldwide incumbents (left or right) survived 2024 elections?
taumaturgo
@Baud: Just to clarify, are you claiming that the voters didn’t want what democrats were offering in the two losing elections? This is then on the producers to change the script and the actors, however, in the second chance they stuck to the rejected script and the same old actors? In my view, it is time to change the producers, script and actors, otherwise the definition of insanity fits perfectly.
–ly Ballou
@Baud: Yeah, I realize we’ve got bigger problems to deal with right now but good Christ is my working-poor ass ever tired of PMC white liberals pretending like “good” schooling and advanced degrees are some foolproof inoculation against shitty values and shittier politics.
And that’s to say nothing of the fact that mass undereducation is an actual policy goal that conservatives have been pursuing (and too many white PMC liberals have been tacitly accepting) for at least since Reagan was warned of “the danger of producing an educated proletariat” nigh on half a century ago.
Baud
@taumaturgo:
We change people all the time. And we have primaries where anyone can compete to persuade our voters that they should be the nominees. Mamdani just won one. AOC did previously. But we’re a large diverse party, and there’s only so much we can do in any one election to chase voters who are moving to the right. We’re just not that flexible.
WTFGhost
@WTFGhost:
Nevermind, got the bill (ahem) writing part done:
The Ballad of Don Shitzinpantz:
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
On the south side of the Capitol, it’s the fugly part of the Hill,
and if you go down there, you better just beware of the big bad fugly bill.
Shitizpants was a liar, see he said he stood six three, cool
Those capitol girls call him shorty toadstool but the men just call him a fool.
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
Now Donnie he a baldie and big combover, crass
And he hates to stand out in the rain, where his skull shows like his ass!
He got some bad boy Secret Service
He got the federal cops, by chance
He needs those boys, as distractory toys, whenever he and shits his pants!
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
Donnie passed a turd one day, and he sent it on to the Hill
And at the bar was a Johnson and a Thune-y guy and they squished it to a “beautiful bill”
It was dirty and it smelled so bad, it could even made you puke up lye
It was cruel and mean and the best you could see was, we all is gonna die.
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
For some reason, I’m having a hard time writing the next verse, where the American people have had enough. Must be the holiday season.
sab
I just carried Solomon across our house to my bedroom. He shrieked and meowed the whole way. I put him down in my bedroom. He stood, stunned, for a while. Then he got on the bed and went to sleep.
Cats are not as complicated as they want us to think they are.
Belafon
@sab: They’re libertarians.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
I would guess that T ostensibly wants the Dems to move left, so chasing a right moving electorate wouldn’t have satisfied them in any case. Assuming you are correct about the electorate swing right. I tend to think that a lot of them are simply angry and interested in lashing out. If I am right, we can use that anger against Trump and the GOP. OTOH, riding that tiger is dangerous.
Elizabelle
@Baud:
And boy, are those fuckers in for a surprise and some education.
May those voters get it. Good and hard.
TONYG
These assholes voted for this shit bill, but are begging the Senate to change it. Jesus Christ, these gutless shitheads. I’m old enough to remember old-school fascists like Jesse Helms. At least they were open about their fascist beliefs.
Elizabelle
I am not going to celebrate the Fourth of July this year. It will be a day to do other things.
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
RaflW
The whole idea of a Republican budget is a bitter, ugly joke. Trumpists have made it clear that they’ll cut anything they feel like defunding, and the Republican congressional caucuses will breathe a sigh of relief because it saves them from another unpopular vote.
The only reason the WH is forcing this through is that they can’t fudge the expiring tax cuts, and they can’t fudge appropriating billions into the GestapICE.
Elizabelle
@sab: I am glad the new cats are getting along with the pitbull. Everyone’s tension level has lessened.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Phylllis: impeach & convict ?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Another Scott: I had the same thought. I should have read ahead.
Steve LaBonne
@Omnes Omnibus: We are entering an era in which America will visibly be in persistent decline, at times severe. This virtually guarantees that politics will come to be dominated by resentment. Rather than moving in any coherent political direction the country will increasingly become ungovernable. Nobody can predict what will succeed a possibly prolonged period of serious instability. I’m pretty sure I won’t live to see the successor regime whatever it may be.
leeleeFL
Since this is an open thread, I have a computer question or two.
I am pretty done with my Lenovo computer. Microsoft blocks my Google Chrome incessantly, wanting me (and everyone else, to use EDGE, which is BING!) Now, they will end support, such as it is, for Windows 10. Didn’t find the previews of Windows 11 very impressive. Sooooo, thinking a MAC is next!? Never used Apple anything! Will I like it? Will I be able to preserve saved stuff from my Lenovo somehow? And, is a refurbished MAC safe and likely to be useful for awhile? Inquiring minds want to know! Thanks for any input!
Betty
@Omnes Omnibus: Agree. I think Mamdani understood that anger and responded to it. It’s a valuable lesson if Democrats will learn from it.
Lobo
Having the US fall in the most stupidest way. Wow! As someone mentioned this is a Republican suicide-murder act.
My thoughts:
Anne Caprara @annecaprara.bsky.social
· 3mo
The fight going on in the Democratic Party right now is not between hard left, left and moderate. It’s between those who want to fight and those who want to cave. And Team Fight stretches across all ideological aspects of the Party. Misread this at your own peril
Steve LaBonne
@leeleeFL: I occasionally use my wife’s M1 MacBook Air when I need a real computer. I hate Apple mobile devices, but the MacBook is a pleasure to use.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
We’ll see. We’re already in the hole with a lot of people because we promise to upset settled expectations. But if Trump can make enough people miserable, we have a shot.
Elizabelle
@leeleeFL: Refurbished Mac is definitely safe. My first MacBook was a 2007 refurbished model. It lasted at least 7 to 8 years, and still runs. (Albeit, need to plug it in. The battery no longer accepts a charge.)
I love Apple, and especially their Genius bar. It’s easy to get support, and in my experience they have been very good with fixing stuff, as needed, often under warranty or just for free.
Have a 2014 AirBook that is humming along
The only thing that is aggravating is less ports, with each new model.
RaflW
@Omnes Omnibus: “riding that tiger is dangerous”
Yeah. Desperate people behave in desperate and directionally unpredictable ways. I can’t say how things will get worse in terms of community stability and coherence, but neither can elected Republicans.
I know there are the Juicers who say that elections will just be cancelled. And certainly Trump says alarming things that suggest that’s what he wants.
But that’s never been tried at scale in the US (though mass disenfranchisement definitely has been done). A couple hundred million people take that process for granted and snatching it away may not be the easy game Republicans might be thinking it is.
Or I could be wrong, and we’re a more docile and dictator-ready country than I expect.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Hungry Joe: I heard San Diego went full sane this last election! Congratulations !
WereBear
@sab: Let the record show they complained, that’s all :)
Captain C
@Tim C:
A lot of people are going to have to get better educated, way less selfish, and work on their attention spans and Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
Belafon
@leeleeFL: The only time Microsoft tries to get me to switch to Edge is when they do a major update, and I just tell it no; if you’re seeing it more often, there’s probably a switch somewhere to turn it off. There are a couple of things you can do to Windows 11 to undo some of the things like the location of the button on the task bar and the context menus so they revert back to the Windows 10 style, otherwise, it’s not really that much different in the UI.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Phylllis: I think Senator Murkowski was shocked the press was demanding she answer for defending her constituents effectively when there were 49 of her goyper colleagues to chase who voted to hurt their own constituents bigly.
I have to admit that shocked me into a bit of a fugue state, too.
Geminid
@RaflW: I think the Debt Ceiling increase was another reason Republicans pushed this bill through. They were willing to play chicken on this question in 2023, when Biden was President, but now they own the economy and want to shield it from a crisis over the Debt Ceiling.
The Treasury Department is already using “special measures” to stretch out federal funds, like Janet Yellin did back in 2023. Secretary Bessant said earlier this Spring that this matter could not be dragged out much past July.
PaulWartenberg
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we dead yet? Are we there yet? Are we… wait.
tobie
Jeffries says he’s preparing to close his remarks after 8+ hours. I think he should keep on going.
https://www.c-span.org/event/us-house-of-representatives/us-house-of-representatives/434406
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@taumaturgo: While I’m likely wasting my breath, I’m still going to say this. I’m going to vote in the Democratic primaries for candidates that are pragmatic, competent, and the most aligned with my values. In practice, this means I only vote for progressives when the alternative is corrupt. Y’all can scream and cry about it all you like. When I have had to vote for DSA types, they’ve been absolute garbage at governing; completely ineffective, counterproductive, and/or just plain incompetent. Instead of claiming a mandate, it would be refreshing if leftists actually tried to understand why people like me don’t vote for them unless the alternative is completely unacceptable. AOC does get credit from me for exactly that.
NotMax
@leeleeFL
Elementary query. Did you take the negligible time to instruct Windows to make Chrome your default browser?
I use Firefox, not Chrome, but have never once gotten any pushback or noodging from Win 10 to use Edge.
brantl
@tobie: it didn’t disturb them with Covid why would it disturb them now?
Jay
@Chief Oshkosh:
Open thread so,………………
Ever though about putting together a Lemon’s Racing Team?
24 hours of Lemon’s is an endurance race event where $900 cars, (including tires and mods, but safety gear is exempted) are raced over 2 days. It’s mostly supposed to be safe, silly, and fun.
Entry fees pay for track time, and if there is a surplus, it goes to charity.
Often enough, the Team that wins it’s class, is the team that doesn’t blow their car up on the track, or if they do, they spend the night, (often with the assistance of other teams), duct taping their car back together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zhNcyJrQGc
Scout211
Yeah, we had to buy a multiport adapter but that works fine.
Soprano2
@Another Scott: Geez, he signed the bill that he’s now withholding money from!!! It seems pretty clear to me that other are running the show, and using FFOTUS for his PR, to threaten people to fall in line, and for his signature.
gene108
@Tim C:
The right-wing propaganda machine in this country is why the cycle does not change. There’s a huge propaganda network that will justify everything Republicans, and trash everything Democrats. Their audience is vast, and receptive to whatever nonsense they say.
They also control what people talk about “around the water cooler” at work, and what and how the MSM reports on politics.
Since we can’t do shit to get rid of the right-wing propaganda machine, the cycle won’t change.
Also, people feeling real pain will more than likely be used by Republicans to incite violence against non-white people and LGBTQ+ people. Trump’s already inciting violence against Los Angeles with the fascist rhetoric of “liberating” the city and county government from their democratically elected representatives.
Geminid
@NotMax: I was thinking Jimmy Dean’s “Big John.”
“Big Bill…Big Bill…Bi-ll! Big Bad Bill.”
tobie
@brantl:The Republican base convinced itself that the only people dying from COVID were adults with co-morbidities. Seeing children die is another ballgame.
Captain C
@Lobo:
Kind of like the murder-suicides that happen when some retrograde asshole murders his wife (and sometimes kids) rather than allow them to leave, and then realizes that he can’t handle the long prison sentence that will ensue when he gets caught, tried, and convicted.
Josie
@leeleeFL:
I have had three refurbished Macs and have been happy with all of them. I’m typing on the third one now (Macbook Air) The other two still work but the operating systems are no longer viable, plus the battery in one is played out. I highly recommend refurbished Mac hardware.
ETA: This is over a period of 30 years, give or take.
Scout211
Yes. At least for the most part.
Transfer from PC to Mac with Migration Assistant
taumaturgo
@Omnes Omnibus: Chasing right-wing voters and moving to the right is what corporate democrats specializes in. Mamdani and AOC won going against established Democrats selected as the main actors by the democratic producers in a stale old script. I claim if the producers, the script and the actors remain the same, nothing significant can be accomplished.
Currently, Mamdani is getting death threats, and the felon is threatening him with taking away his legal alien status and deportation. Have you heard the uproar of support and indignation from the democratic establishment? Neither have I. Some of it is Islamophobia within the ranks, most of it is fear of facing up to the real challenge of what needs to be done in order to step out of the same old, same old. Follow a new script with a new actor, or repeat the same mistakes.
TONYG
@Phylllis: The only power that Congress has in response to this unlawful behavior is impeachment and conviction. Which, of course, ain’t gonna happen.
Soprano2
@Omnes Omnibus: I agree with that. I was talking with a co-worker about the Cardinals AA team and their ballpark (he moved here from Oregon and he and his family are going to a game tonight). I mentioned that the alcohol offerings at the park have increased a lot from when it first opened in 2005. Our admin asked who gets that money? I said it’s probably a concession that is bid out. Then she told me that she’s still bitter about the city government buying the ballpark because we don’t get big raises! They bought a ballpark that was built for $51 million in 2004/2005, that is a big economic engine for the city, for $16 million! The Cardinals pay $1 million/year rent, and signed a lease for the next 15 years, so basically they’re making all that money back from the rent, plus they can keep the team from leaving (it was threatening to leave because the previous owner of the stadium wasn’t doing needed repairs and upgrades). She was mad because she wants the city to use that money to give us raises, even though that’s not how city funding works. They used special money to buy it; the uses of that money were limited. I think most people care more about themselves than they do about “society” or “the future”.
Soprano2
They wanted something different than what the Republicans are actually offering, but they didn’t pay enough attention to understand that. If you paid attention to what they said they were going to do you aren’t a bit surprised by most of what FFOTUS and Republicans are doing. I think a lot of these people heard what they wanted to hear, and voted the same way. Those people are in for a big surprise!
TONYG
@gene108: Yes, but: nobody is forcing approximately half the “adults” in this country to listen to and obey the right-wing propaganda machine. Nobody is forcing all these people to be idiots and assholes. Companies like Fox News and NewsMax make a lot of money because they’re telling the stupider, crueler half of the country exactly what they want to hear. If those companies went bankrupt tomorrow, other companies would rise up to take their place.
Steve LaBonne
“Democrats need to fight!” [Jeffries holds up passage of the One Big Billionaire Blowjob by holding the House floor for more than 8 hours] “No, not like that!”
stinger
@tobie: “Seeing young people in hospital beds will disturb them.”
Why? Twenty dead first-graders made not a blip in gun control laws.
Elizabelle
Dang. Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill) has died at age 67.
Seems to be natural causes; cardiac arrest. Found dead at his home in Malibu.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Geminid: Go Hakeem! was how his thumping argument for sanity over cruelty connected with me.
taumaturgo
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Well, how’s that working out? Two catastrophic losses have resulted in the current state of underachievement. I understand there is comfort in ingroup thinking and likeness, but so is true in every other groups.
How did Trump transform the Republican establishment? By wiping the slate clean. Imagine for a moment if in the democratic side the slate is wiped clean except decent, honest younger individuals would be selected instead of corrupted fools.
PsiFighter37
Maybe nitpicky, but Jeffries breaking the old record by 12 minutes lends a more performative air to the act. This is serious shit – he should have held the floor for as long as Booker did, if not longer, to emphasize what a horrible piece of shit this legislation is.
gene108
@taumaturgo:
I agree with this.
I don’t know how long the shock of the current situation needs to take to wear off, in order for Democrats to what’s needed to keep Republicans out of power like expanding the federal judiciary, when they control, if not the SCOTUS, when they control government again.
I don’t see a great uprising of actual opposition within the Democratic Party that’s willing to do the work within the party of creating change.
There’s a bunch of peripheral leftist groups screaming about tearing down the Democratic Party and the “gerontocracy”, but don’t do shit to build up state and local Democratic parties that are starving for support.
They’re performative wankers.
tobie
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I gave money to one of the Act Blue funds Charles Gaba organizes for swing district races. It was the best way for me to honor the fight Jeffries showed today.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Modi, but his party did lose their absolute majority and is now in a coalition government.
Omnes Omnibus
@PsiFighter37:
Nitpicky, yes. Of course it is performative. That’s what the Dems have to work with right now.
Steve LaBonne
@taumaturgo: If I were dictator I would enact policies so left wing they would make the DSA blush. But I can’t pretend not to notice the colossal political ineptitude of the actually existing left. And not just in the US but useless idiots in other countries like eg. Mélenchon in France.
Baud
@PsiFighter37:
I’d imagine it’s timed so that the vote will occur at a time when more people will be paying attention.
tobie
@PsiFighter37: Agree…talk through the night. Make the Republicans work on the 4th of July.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@–ly Ballou: remember the teachers’ strikes? Down in Texas too, folks beat back numerous attacks on their schools (even rejected significant checks in their own pockets) until the TX GOP just primaried nearly every one of the objectors out of office by claiming they were not sufficiently trumpie.
Americans are mostly fond of education, most teachers and the schools their children attend. This is an information war. If we can get folks the truth, you would be surprised how very much we can win. It is not the message or the messenger that is the problem. It is connecting the truth with the voters where we have lost ground.
Steve LaBonne
@PsiFighter37: Thanks for coming along so promptly to illustrate what I wrote above.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@tobie: I listened to nearly all of it and he held my intention throughout.
Geminid
@HopefullyNotcassandra: A friend has been listening to Jeffries speech all mornig. He likened it to an old time tent revival meeting, said it was “fantastic,” with his Caucus members cheering him on.
My friend just texted me, said Jeffries wrapped up his spesch and is being swarmed, with chants of “Hakeem! Hakeem!”
This is why a large cohort of Democratic Party-adjacent soreheads invest so much energy into tearing Jeffries down.
Miss Bianca
@tobie: I’m not sure even that is going to work. What a fucking country. Happy 4th of July.
Geminid
@PsiFighter37: Jeffries should have held the floor as long as his caucus wanted him to, and that is what he did. He’s responsible to them, not us.
Phylllis
Reminds me of the Ybor City Cigar Factor Lectors.
Princess
@PsiFighter37: They’ll get angry if they suffer financially. That’s what it will take.
Miss Bianca
@JML: My ex always used to say, when some bribery scandal erupted with some politician (remember when we used to get upset about such things? How quaint it all.seems now): “It’s not that they can be bought. it’s that they can be bought for so *little*.”
Some cheap-ass autographed merch. Hell, it’s not even a bag of twenty dollar bills.
Steve LaBonne
@Miss Bianca: Nothing was ever going to prevent passage indefinitely . Even Republicans who opposed parts of the bill were objecting to radically different things so there was no possibility of any alternative emerging. Schumer and Jeffries did what could be done: preventing them from sneaking it through in the middle of the night and suppressing information about its actual contents. Also, especially in the Senate, making vulnerable Republicans vote against amendments to make some parts of it less horrid.
WTFGhost
@leeleeFL: Macs and Windows machines have a few oddities, but, you can use a USB drive to move files between them.
That means any document, or media file can move, but, keep in mind, media files might be copy protected, and notice they’re not on the old (licensed!) computer, and refuse to work. I think you get a warning when this happens – you should! – and that’s the only time you’ll see a difference within the file itself.
So: a PDF is still a PDF, it just opens with a Mac PDF reader, not a Windows PDF reader. Etc., for all documents and media.
If you’re not a windows guru, make sure you leave system, and hidden, files hidden, if you use USB drives between the two machines. If you see what’s different, you will only ask questions that are like the ones you asked at the age of four. “That’s just the way it is, my beloved four-year-old!” (Um. I’m stoned – that was meant to be a humorous interlude, not any kind of nastiness. If I blew my tone, sincere apologies.)
That is pretty much it. I’m sure there are Windows programs that demand registry entries, and their files won’t open on Macs, and Mac programs that rely on the underlying Unix architecture, and you can’t open their files on Windows. Those are rare birds, these days, though. Everyone understands interoperability and common standards, because everything has to play everywhere, on every device, these days.
If I didn’t support SQL Server, so that I needed SQL Server Management Studio (which could only be installed in kludgy ways on Macs), I think I never would have set down the Mac I started with. Some of the advantage over Windows were ridiculously helpful, like, icons doing little dances when they need attention, and so far, I haven’t seen that replicated on Windows.
(That might be because I’m too cussed tired to read the documentation, to find out if that option is available. Being broken-brained really sucks.)
But your basic needs are there, with multiple selections. You can play media with multiple easy programs; you can web browse with multiple easy programs; you can do office stuff with multiple programs (that aren’t always easy, because the office stuff is getting so complicated these days!) You have Microsoft’s office suite, for the ultimate in compatibility, and comfort – I’d hate to have to learn an entire new office suite (especially if I had to use all the programs frequently) today, so I stick with Office, or like-a-looks, like Libre Office.
leeleeFL
@NotMax: yes, from Day One years ago!
Captain C
@Steve LaBonne:
They would still tell you that you were doing it wrong.
Steve LaBonne
@Captain C: Goes without saying.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@tobie:
I dunno. Slaughtering children with gunfire didn’t change their attitudes one iota vis a vis NEEDZ MOAR GUNZZZZZZZ!
Instead they just viewed that as a (continuing) necessary Aztec-esque blood sacrifice at the Tree of Liberty for FREEDUMB!!!!!
Kirk
@RaflW:
I don’t expect them to be cancelled. I /DO/ expect a deployment of DHS (in particular ICE) forces to blue leaning close race polling stations to “Preserve and Protect the Integrity of American Elections.” (see the EO here)
Mostly under this clause:
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
I would change “In God We Trust” on all the money to “In Baud We Trust.”
Splitting Image
@taumaturgo:
What did he wipe clean? He transformed the Republicans from a party that used racism and misogyny to sell tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation into a party that uses racism and misogyny to sell tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: “In Baud we trust, all others wear pants.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Tim C:
Mistermix calls this the “Drive The Car Into A Ditch” theory of our current electoral process.
Voters grab the steering wheel from the Dems and swerve the car into a ditch. It sits for two years, they then vote us back in to get the car out of the ditch where it cruises along for 2 years, then, WHAMMO, back into the ditch.
I know, that doesn’t address your fundamental question of stopping them from grabbing the wheel in the first place.
Paul in KY
@WTFGhost: Really good so far!
Steve LaBonne
@Splitting Image: Bouie just wrote a very good column explaining that Trump is doing what any other Republican president would have done. Everything in the One Big Billionaire Blowjob is a long time Republican policy goal and every Republican President since Nixon has already advanced important parts of that agenda.
Citizen Alan
I don’t think they’ll be cancelled outright. But at this point, just stationing ICE outside every polling station in a close district would probably be enough to swing the election.
I remember when the book The Coming Democratic Majority or whatever it was called came out. A lot of people at Kos and other Dem sites crowed over it, but my response then and now was that the GOP could delay that Coming Democratic Majority for a rather long time if they were successful enough at voter suppression. And they could delay it for a very, very long time if they turned America into an Apartheid state.
Steve LaBonne
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: This time we may turn out to have gone right over the cliff. Currently in the “Wile E. Coyote hasn’t looked down yet” phase.
AWOL
@Elizabelle: O gosh darn. Another nihilistic human promoting nihilistic violence in a nihilistic nation for a nihilistic audience for nihilistic profits in order to gain nihilistic fame is dead. Ginny Weeps.
Mo MacArbie
@leeleeFL: I’ve been running Linux on a couple Lenovos now, IdeaPads in my case. There’s a chance that you may have to learn more than you ever wanted to learn about your computer that way, but it’s free. Copy everything to an external drive first.
The good part is that answers are out there on the internet somewhere. Heaven knows that searching for ways to fix Windows problems is frustrating. “Hello, I am a trained help professional. Have you tried rebooting?” “Need help? Buy this application!”
Mark
We’ve been through this enough times to know that the GOP reps weren’t going to vote this bill down.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@taumaturgo: Yes, I can see how you are comforted by in group thinking. As for me, like I said, the last couple of progressives I voted for were an absolute disaster for the city I live in. Things are measurably worse than when they came into office. Now that we have two of those offices filled with moderates again, I’m seeing signs of improvement. So that’s how it’s working out for me. At the national level, I’ll take Bell over progressive Cori Bush any day. I’d say she alienated more voters than she attracted and the proof is in her resounding defeat after only one term.
Citizen Alan
I probably agree with the DSA on 99% of issues. The 1% where we disagree can be summed up with the following question:
Is the DSA a legitimate political organization capable of achieving any of its stated goals, or is it a motley collection of cranks, malcontents, and bad-faith actors who are financed by hostile foreign powers and by domestic oligarchs who want to use it to undermine the Democratic party and make calls for socialist solutions seem ridiculous.
Or to put that another way, I will never support an organization whose every action over the last 25 years has made it less likely that any of its preferred policies will ever be enacted.
Citizen Alan
@brantl: Indeed. These are the cretins that will encourage their children to hug measles-infected classmates so they can catch it and develop “natural immunity.”
satby
James Talerico needs to run for something bigger than state senator in TX. He’s a Buttigieg style communicator to the Christians who believe Democrats are anti-religion/ anti-christianity.
NaijaGal
77,361,198 people voted for a candidate other than Trump in 2024. 77,302,580 voted for what we have today. 89,278,948 people were eligible to vote but did not vote in 2024.
I think the future of the US depends on those 89,278,948 people. Do they care enough about what’s happening today? Do they even know? What media do they consume? What kinds of jobs or healthcare do they have? Are they working two or three jobs with barely a moment to think about anything but how to put food on the table and pay bills? Are they comfortable but think that the US works on autopilot so there’s no need to bother with voting? Who has an accurate picture of this group? Whether we like it or not, they will determine our future and we have to make sure that they have a full picture of what’s really going on, no matter what else is consuming their time.
Jay
re. Alligator Auschwitz,
Vid at link
Taco Don says farmers will be “owners” again,…………………………
https://bsky.app/profile/fetchstep.bsky.social/post/3lszhk4z6kc2t
Citizen Alan
@gene108: Funny to me how the people squalling about “the Gerontocracy” by and large worship 83yo Bernie Sanders.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
Exactly. It’s simply bog-standard GOP policy desires with tough guy marketing. Tax cuts for the rich, slash Medicaid, repeal a bunch of Obamacare, it’s all very Romney 2012.
Hell, Romney’s immigration policy came from MAGA diehard Kris Kobach and can betcher ass what we’re seeing now would have been started then.
Splitting Image
@Mo MacArbie:
This is the route I took. I bought a new M.2 drive and installed Zorin Linux on it, dual booting with my old system, which I still have if I need it. I’ve been moving all of my old software over to the new system and making sure everything works. I also installed VMware and now have Windows in a virtual machine for those programs that are indispensible and which won’t run without Windows.
It was a lot cheaper than buying a whole new computer.
I’m really happy with the results. No more warnings about Windows 10 becoming obsolete. No more downloading an update and rebooting when I have files open.
Belafon
@PsiFighter37: Yes, yes it is nitpicky. Unless he could stand there for 48 hours, to really drive the vote into the holiday break, all the time was really good for is to get the message out that what’s coming is bad. And he did. So let’s just run with the effort and call Republicans cowards, thieves, and killers.
NotMax
@Baud
This word “trust” that you use….
:)
PsiFighter37
Shit sandwich passed. I will be happy that by the end of tomorrow, I will be enjoying the long weekend on the Canadian side of the border.
Jay
@PsiFighter37:
Montreal?
Albatrossity
When Moscow Mitch said “They’ll get over it”, he wasn’t talking about us, or kids, or senior citizens, or immigrants. He was talking about the GOP base. They are counting on those folks to let emotions (hate, racism, etc.) govern their votes, rather than facts and logic, or even economic pain. They are also counting on their party’s ability to lie and gaslight incessantly so that hate and racism stay at the top of their voter’s concerns.
That has certainly worked before. And I, for one, would not bet against it working again. We are well and truly fucked, and so are they, but Mitch and TACO have fooled them before, and probably will fool them again.
Geminid
@Citizen Alan: My impression of the DSA is more positive. Their Chomsky-ite International Committee aside, I see a lot sincere people there who genuinely want to make a better world. I don’t neccesarily share their political program, but I can respect them.
There are only a hundred thousand or so DSA members though. The problem I have is with a larger group of soreheads adjacent them and to the Democratic Party, that I call the “Dirtbag Left.” Those folks are too lazy and cynical to join the DSA.
And they generally are accelerationists. They say they want a better world, but they think it has to get worse before they can make it better and they don’t mind helping make it worse.
But except for a few really fringe parties, the DSA is the only organized group on the Left. So they end up taking the rap for people who disdain them almost as much as they disdain the Democratic Party.
Juju
I’m 63. I’m probably going to have an large increase in what I have to pay for my health insurance, because they are lowering the subsidies, and when I am eligible for Medicare is about the time they will start cutting Medicare. I have been screwed over by Republicans my whole voting life staring with Reagan. I’m am sick and tired of it. Representative Murphy is going down.
Professor Bigfoot
@taumaturgo: It’s the fault of the Black, Jewish and female led Democrats that 2/3 of white men voted for the 34 count felon, all fucking right.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
Splitting Image
@Geminid:
Strangely enough, they absolutely hate it when the Democratic establishment makes something worse, which they are always supposedly doing because they are really a corporatist party in cahoots with, and indistinguishable from, the GOP.
p.a.
Has raven posted recently?
Professor Bigfoot
@taumaturgo: They had Black people, Jews, and women in positions of authority and white men couldn’t conceivably accept that.
PsiFighter37
@Jay: Niagara-on-the-Lake. We went to Toronto a little over a month ago and were inspired by an exhibit called Little Canada that showed the Golden Horseshoe region.
Professor Bigfoot
@taumaturgo: That’s correct.
The majority of white voters wanted white supremacy and voted for it.
Since you’re white, that’s probably not a bridge too far, but a lot of us see it clearly.
cain
@Tim C: new bills that will punish Dems because they are on a timer. This cycle always relies on GOP holding one branch of govt.
Unless we have a trifecta we are not going to fix democracy. It should be made very clear to Dem politicians that the agre comity is over. It’s the single biggest problem I have with our party. They keep trying to be bipartisan. Still trying to get that white male vote.
Geminid
@Splitting Image: I see a lot really bad-faith arguments coming from that crowd. They’re always crying Crocodile Tears Although these might better be described as Copperhead Tears.
cain
@SW:
I am afraid you are right but so much needless death and trauma.
But here we are. The American voting public purposely threw away a recovery in progress because of misogyny and racism.
Jay
@PsiFighter37:
Go for the town, the food, the lake,
Stay for the wine.
p.a.
I don’t mind them TALKING that game for the (any?) electoral benefit. As long as it’s just talk. But the fucking stupidity of naming anything Dems pass the “Bipartisan Bill to…”🤬🤬🤬
Lobo
@Splitting Image:
Well the accelerationists got their wish! Okay, guys was it worth it?
Splitting Image
@Tim C:
Krugman seems to be of the opinion that the tariffs will do more damage overall, because Trump’s back and forth made it clear that nobody with any brains is running the show. The ability of the US to bounce back quickly has always been based on the idea that the median vote in government was smart enough to do what it took to solve a real problem.
In theory, the US could bounce back quickly from this bill, simply by throwing the current bums out, but other countries are making plans to disentangle themselves from the US sphere of influence, so it will be a lot harder to fix this than any previous crisis, and would be even if this bill did half as much damage as it probably will.
Belafon
@cain: Since the passage of the VRA and CRA, Democrats have almost always had to be in a defensive position trying to protect what they can get. When Republicans do bad, enough whites shift to give them power. When Democrats fix it, those same whites realize they hate blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, and LGBTQ+.
And the fact that all it takes is a few whites to shift means that we have to figure out how to permanently attract whites without giving up what the party is based on, which is blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, and LGBTQ+.
Eolirin
@cain: That’s because they can do math. Every major election we’ve won has been because we’ve reduced our losses with white rural men. We can’t currently win elections when we lose 2/3rds or more of them. If White women started voting for Dems like white men vote for Republicans we’d have an out. But they don’t. And not even Dobbs moved the needle very much there.
We can’t throw out any other part of the coalition and win either though, so if the ask to get white men back is to toss over another group, we just lose and will continue to lose outside of GOP induced crises, and assuming we even get elections that aren’t rigged.
Timill
@p.a.: Last posted on 6/29 in the World Cup thread
Professor Bigfoot
@Jay: John Brown’s body lies a moulderin’ in the grave, but his truth keeps marching on.
MFs are going to touch off violence such as this country hasn’t seen before with this.
”This business will get out of hand. It will get out of hand and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
Josie
@satby:
He is so impressive, but he is not as well known as some other Texas politicians.
Belafon
@Belafon: And just to be clear, the Democratic party mostly just sucks way less at it than Republicans. but our representatives look more like America now than they do.
satby
Belafon
@NaijaGal: Most of them are so uninformed they probably don’t know if they’re registered to vote.
Eolirin
@Belafon: They’re going to kill, imprison, and deport their way back to being representative. Or try to.
Citizen_X
@AWOL: What the entire fuck? He was an actor.
You claim to be denouncing “nihilism.” Your response, however, is more nihilistic than anything Tarantino has ever put out.
WTFGhost
Okay, filk song – the rewriting of a known song to have different words, as in “something we scifi weirdos do when we hang out.”
To the tune of Bad Bad Leroy Brown by Jim Croce
(but please note that his song was far more awesome than mine with rhythm and rhyme schemes within others, that I just didn’t try to duplicate)
Music belongs to (I assume) Croce, words may be freely distributed, noting the copyright is in the name of one WTFGhost, with spacing and punctuation as desired. W. T. FGHOST, WT F GHOST, I don’t care.
I tried to clean it up, but, broken brain, even on THC is still a broken brain.
Note: unlike the Croce song, the chorus comes first so we introduce a necessary character.
The Ballad of Don Shitzinpantz:
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
On the south side of the Capitol, it’s the fugly part of the Hill,
and if you go down there, you better just beware of the big bad fugly bill.
Shitizpants was a liar, see he said he stood six three, cool
Those capitol girls call him shorty toadstool but the men just call him a fool.
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
Now Donnie he a baldie has big combover, crass
And he hates to stand out in the rain, where his skull shows like his ass!
He got some bad boy Secret Service
He got the federal cops, by chance
He needs those boys, as distractory toys, whenever he shits his pants!
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
Donnie passed a turd one day, and he sent it on to the Hill
And at the bar was a Johnson and a Thune-y guy and they squished it to a “beautiful bill”
It was dirty and it smelled so bad, it even made you puke up lye
It was cruel and mean and the best you could see was, we all is gonna die.
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
Now bad boys often take a fall, as Jim Croce tells us true
And we all can hope that justice comes for ol’ Donnie and his crew!
it hurts to think donnie and his buds will go scot free
‘specially when they say all Dems should be hang-ed from a tree!
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
It was a big, bad, fugly bill
baddest thing from the Capitol Hill
Badder than a disco dance
And mean as Don Shitzinpantz!
ETA: “craps-his-pants” seems to scan for Shitzenpantz, and, of course, you can be prudish and bowlderize to “Schitzenpantz”
Final note: if someone is killed, by hanging, they are “hanged,” not “hung”. So hit that second syllable proudly.
Lobo
To those who wondered about urging Senate Democrats to use all their procedural mechanisms at hand, including quorum calls. In this instance the during the reading of the bill the chamber was empty at several points during the night. They argued that a quorum call only lasts 15 minutes but missed the most important part of it:
This is the important part, It would have forced time including making forcing Republicans to get out of bed and return to the chamber to fulfill a quorum. As soon as enough left rinse and repeat. This at least would have made them earn their disgusting victory. Of course, putting on holds, refusing unanimous consent, using the CRA, etc. could also have been used at various times. They are not completely helpless.
Steve LaBonne
@Lobo: We get it. No matter what Democrats do they were doing it wrong. Surely we ought to put you in charge.
Lobo
@Steve LaBonne: I can both despise the Republicans for what they did and believe the more fighting Democrats. I see my gente, especially in LA, putting in more fight and feelings the effects than some of our comfortable representatives. I know many of my gente will be filling those concentration camps and sold to those farmer “owners.” So yes, I wish a lot of Democratic leadership had been showing more fight along the way.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Citizen Alan: I absolutely agree age can be valuable when it brings wisdom and knowledge of the rules. Senator Byrd died an old fellow in our Senate, true; nonetheless, that old man knew all the rules. He also never enriched himself at the public till. He lived in a second story rental walk-up when he died. He began life a racist and left life a member of the rainbow coalition, too. His wisdom, acumen and humanity grew with the passing of the years.
We do need to have members in the house. Had we sadly not lost three this year the ugly, old bill might have failed today.
To fix that problem, though, we truly need an improved healthcare system for all. Instead, today our healthcare system got a whole lot worse.
satby
@Lobo: well, in spite of the magic fairy dust you appear to believe a quorum call is, this result was baked in when the Republicans won the trifecta in November. None of your desired actions would change that.
Hope all the “Genocide Joe/Kamala” people are happy. Actually, since lots of them were probably getting funded by Russia, they probably are.
Belafon
@Lobo: Obviously, Democrats were in charge of the chamber, and were the only ones who could put a stop to it. And their 47 votes at the end were enough to defeat the bill had they just wanted to harder.
Question, how many Democratic reconciliation bills did Republicans stop?
NaijaGal
@Eolirin: They’ll try to. It won’t work but it will be especially brutal for minorities and immigrants like me, while they try to figure it out. The $45 billion approved for immigration detention facilities at a time when the US actually needs immigration tells me all I need to know.
The US population will decline in spite of the different anti-abortion laws at the state level because this is not a group of people that knows how to make it more attractive for white women (the only group they really care about) to have and raise more children. The number of white supremacists looking to migrate to the US from Europe and South Africa won’t make up for the loss of other immigrants (as a result of this bill) in the short or long term.
The economic impact of the choices being made might be the only thing that moves the Citizens United-enabled owners of the Republican party to make different choices. Destroying the America that made them billionaires might negatively impact their wealth, which is all they do care about. Enough of them think they can escape to New Zealand or Mars or tough it out in a bunker, so whether they learn any lessons remains to be seen.
Republican voters handing the Supreme Court, House, Senate and presidency to the Republican Party will be a wake-up call for some of the 89 million non-voters. I hope enough of them figure out the right thing to do in spite of our right-slanted media environment.
brendancalling
@PsiFighter37: That would indeed be nice but…
@trollhattan: yup. No one will remember shit by 2026, and those who do will be drowned out by the subdued media. I’m already seeing the NYT misreport 33,000 jobs lost as 147,000 jobs gained. The GOP will blame the Dems for their own bill’s cruelty and the media will go along with it.
@tobie: really? They don’t seem to care about school shooting victims or kids dying of Covid.
@Steve LaBonne: Also too, I’m very tired of being the party that fixes everything the GOP breaks, and then not only gets no credit—we actually get electorally punished for our efforts. I’m still wondering why Biden gave the red states all those green energy jobs that are now going away, to the great cheers of those same red states that benefited from our largesse—they were never going to vote for Democrats (while their leaders take credit for projects they opposed).
On a side note, July 2 marked six months sober. Well, California-sober. As y’all can see, it’s had a major impact on my ordinarily cynical and negative perspective on politics and humanity.
jonas
House Republicans voted based on a simple calculus. The main feature of the bill was making Trump’s huge first-term upper-class and corporate tax cuts permanent. That’s all that matters. That’s the big, sloppy blowjob for their donor class. To get that, they had to go along with a bunch of social safety-net cutting and other bullshit that’s probably going to hit a lot of their lower-income base pretty hard, but as Republicans have always known, those folks can be bought off with a bunch of culture war gaslighting and more promises to get those illegals. And they’ll take it. Always have, always will. As McConnell said, “they’ll get over it.” He wasn’t born yesterday.
As Doug Anderson was pointing out the other day, however, the real disaster in all of this is that if there are elections in 26 and 28 and Dems win, they’re going to be left holding — in the memorable words of Jeremy Irons’ CEO character in Margin Call — the “biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.” A spiraling deficit, spiraling interest rates, and a Social Security fund approaching insolvency. Trump is going to leave behind an economic disaster of unimaginable proportions. Paring back a lot of military spending, and esp. the outrageous budget increases for CBP/ICE will be a start (plus a lot of stuff we’d rather not cut), but the rest will have to be rolling back these tax cuts and raising new ones like getting rid of the SS income cap. Borrowing more won’t be an option at that point. Those are going to be doable with hefty majorities in both chambers and certainly make Dems vulnerable to a backlash that just brings the next generation of MAGA back to power. I’m not sure how we plan to deal with all this. It’s exhausting enough these days just planning for next week given how we’re no longer a country as much as shitshow with clownshoes.
Baud
@brendancalling:
Congratulations!
catclub
correct
Jay
@satby:
@Belafon:
Lobo is not saying that these procedure’s would stop the passing of the Bill, he is pointing out that the Democratic Party Members in the House have a bunch of procedural rules they could have applied to a) piss of the Rethugs and b) delay the passage of the bill.
Mirror the delay and obstructing tactics the ReThugs use in both Chambers when they are the “Opposition”.
WTFGhost
@jonas: AHEM…
Social Security is facing “bankruptcy” not “insolvency”. It needs a roughly 25% increase in income to be able to meet all obligations for the foreseeable future. So, we’re basically at the bankruptcy court, Republicans want retirees to bear the burden (take the haircut in benefits), Democrats want billionaires to do so instead, by paying just a bit more.
catclub
@jonas:
relevant: https://thereformedbroker.com/2016/12/13/every-unified-republican-government-ever-has-led-to-a-financial-crash/
Or as the professor in Futurama says: “Good news Everyone!”
NaijaGal
@Lobo:
Why is there this never ending need to beat up on Democrats when Republicans do something terrible? In a democracy, the party that wins the house, senate and presidency (and “holds” the Supreme Court) gets to enact its policy preferences, no matter how awful. That’s why its important to prevent a party of sociopaths from getting a trifecta and to do everything to try to make sure they pay at the polls in 2026.
I know everyone on Balloon Juice knows this. Looking at BlueSky, it seems that many non politics junkies are figuring this out for the first time.
Steve LaBonne
@NaijaGal: Who knew that 53>47 is abstruse higher math that ordinary mortals can’t understand.
Lobo
On fighting: Here is where I side with TPM. Fighting is often not all about winning, it is also about how you lose. As social animals, seeing others fight stiffens the spine of others for future fights. It is thermostatic. If you all think Democrats have done everything they could have, great. I don’t. They were throwing immigrants(and people who look like them) and LGBTQ+ community under the bus for kitchen issues. But to quote my God:
Like it is, you know, my opinion.
Also:
We are all losers after today. It really depresses me.
Steve LaBonne
@Jay: They used a bunch of procedural rules and delayed it quite a bit. The next time someone explains why delaying until the holiday weekend, when the media spotlight is weaker, would have been preferable, it will be the first time.
JWR
Has everyone seen the latest surveillance footage of ICE behaving badly? From KCAL News (Local L.A. CBS station)
Maybe they can use the influx of cash the GOP just gave them to install a porta-potty on every street corner. Oh, and a hand washing station with every one.
Steve LaBonne
@JWR: If Kegsbreath never washes his hands, why should they?
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Steve LaBonne: probably RFK Jr. is opposed to hand washing too. [/s]
Steve LaBonne
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Unless you wash them in an open sewer. Gotta keep that immune system strong.
cain
@NaijaGal:
Yes, and never mind that decreasing health and education standards are not going to get the smart people here combined with that anti-immigrant attitude. This means that U.S. tech companies who at the moment control the world’s tech will soon lose their leadership because ICE will come after people like me and others working in tech fields.
The declining standards and brutal methods will be followed by over compensation because the economy is going to tank badly and there won’t be any expertise (as soon as they figure out that AI is not going to help them)
The panic after that is going to be magnificent because by that time they would have, I think consolidated republican power in all 3 branches and locked out Dems who can actually fix the problem. None of these people care about policy. They just following the 2025 paper.
cain
@jonas:
I don’t know why any Dem would want that. Especially from a voting public that wants us to fix the problem so they can elect more Republicans.
Jay
@Steve LaBonne:
What media spot light?
It’s all on P. Diddy 24/7.
NaijaGal
@Lobo:
The major fight we lost was in November, 2024. I do understand how you feel, but that’s when we lost. The bill passed today is the manifestation of that loss for all who may not have understood to finally get it. I am despondent today. But we live, learn and fight on tomorrow!
I attended my VoteRiders orientation (thanks for the person who suggested that group to me here on BJ) and now I need to do a lot more to make sure that some of the 89 million who were eligible but didn’t vote for reasons related to Voter ID get the ID they need to vote.
Belafon
@Jay: And we are at this point now because of some of the delays they were able to accomplish. But the real fact is this: Delay was never going to stop this.
What needs to happen is making sure Republicans own this. The whole thing. The procedure to get it made, to get it to a vote, and it passing. At all sorts of points along the way, they could have made it not happen. But they were cowards and are going to be killers. And all “Democrats could have done the one weird trick” is doing is taking away from who actually owns this. It’s time for Republicans to be the party responsible for Republican actions, and not Democrats being the party responsible for protecting everyone from Republicans.
The Thin Black Duke
I’m goddamned tired of the woulda-shoulda-coulda BS when all America needed to do in November was vote for the black woman. Congratulations. I don’t have any children, but I mourn for my niece and the fucked up world she has to exist in because white people are bigoted misogynistic assholes.
Lobo
@NaijaGal: I agree. The was another rough and depressing night. It is all rear guard action now. All of us doing what we can to minimize the harm.
Steve LaBonne
@Jay: Largely true but there is absolutely no argument that passage tomorrow would somehow be worse for Republicans than today. And Democrats didn’t simply slow things down for the sake of slowing them down; Schumer forced the entire Senate bill to be read aloud, and Jeffries held the House floor for over 8 hours to lay out the awfulness of the bill in detail. Unless people really don’t understand that 53>47 and that Republicans were never going to make the bill less bad (the Senate made it worse), I really don’t know what the hell they want. I understand the frustration but jeez, common sense is not counter-revolutionary.
Steve LaBonne
@The Thin Black Duke: That was the time to stop this- and a bunch of Biden voters switched sides or stayed home. And if Clinton had won in 2016 we would have a Supreme Court that would actually rein Trump in even if he had run again and won in 2020.
cain
@The Thin Black Duke:
This. 100%.
The dog has caught the car. So now, we’re gonna see where this takes us. All of us will need to figure out how to take care of each other because the federal govt isnt going to.
Steve LaBonne
@cain: Liberal churches like mine are loci of resistance and mutual aid. It’s not a coincidence that I have become more active in my UU congregation than I have ever been in any previous one.
JWR
@Belafon:
Yes, this. I wonder if they’re planning some big outdoor celebratory gathering like they did once they finally got some no vote on the ACA?
Nah, they can’t be that stupid, can they? (/Rhetorical)
The Thin Black Duke
@cain: Marginalized people know that the monsters are real. And white people are going to find out real soon that when they’re hungry, the monsters don’t discriminate.
Geminid
@Jay: I didn’t see House Republicans effectively obstruct legislation when they were opposition during the 115th Congress (2021-23), when Pelosi and company passed four major spending bills and other measures. I’ve seen people say Republicans did, but they never say when and how.
This is just one of those claims that gets repeated so often people think it’s true. And they want to beleive it’s true because it conforms to a narrative they’ve already bought into.
Steve LaBonne
@The Thin Black Duke: And as long as the Black or brown guy in the next cardboard box over doesn’t even have a sparrow to roast on his curtain rod, they will still be happy.
Captain C
@Steve LaBonne:
You jest, but I suspect this may be true for an alarming number of adults.
Captain C
@cain:
That’s very optimistic of you to think that might happen.
zhena gogolia
@NaijaGal: I know, sigh. It’s why I’m staying off the internet for the most part.
zhena gogolia
@The Thin Black Duke: Yeah.
Captain C
@Geminid:
I think part of it is people trying to give themselves absolution for knowingly not doing the minimium that they should have done.
Jay
@JWR:
In some States, peeing in public in or near a schoolyard puts you on the Sex Offenders list.
Not that ICE has to worry, laws are for little people.
Remember that LA Community Organizer, mother of 3, kidnapped by Bounty Hunters and crammed into a warehouse with 100+ other people,
Juli Pelaez Calderon?
Local Independent Media located the warehouse.
ICE spokeman says, “Not Us, No Bounty Hunters, No Warehouse” to the media.
In a normal, functioning civilization, 10 minutes after the ICE Spokesman’s press conference, a SWAT team would be hitting the warehouse, arresting the armed kidnappers and feeing the hostages.
In the US, that’s a big Nada. Tell you what the US has become and what has been normalized.
NaijaGal
@Steve LaBonne:
They voted for a crew that believes that only the rich matter and who will bulldoze their eyesore cardboard boxes and curtain rods and ban the consumption of sparrows, to keep the landscape looking neat.
Steve LaBonne
@NaijaGal: It is possible that Republicans really will manage to lose a decisive number of their base voters this way. At the moment I’m not quite ready to be that optimistic.
The Thin Black Duke
@Steve LaBonne: Nice callback.
Still, there is a point where even white selfish morons expect competency, and this administration is stupid; they don’t know how anything works, so when the next big inevitable problem happens (measles outbreak, weather-related disaster, terrorist attack, etc.), they won’t know what to do to fix it.
These white selfish morons are going to feel the pain; I’m just sorry the rest of us have to pay the tax.
Jay
@Steve LaBonne:
If they had used all the procedural tricks and hoops,
a) They would have forced the Rethugs who went home for a good nights sleep to have to return and be present. When the ReThugs did this the Democrats had to arrange a rotating list of quorum members.
b) they would have had a good chance of pushing the pass date past the July 4th deadline that King Taco Supreme set, maybe even into next week and making him pissed at the ReThugs for not delivering his “gift” on time”.
It’s called “making the ReThugs work for it”.
Jay
@Geminid:
Obstruct does not mean defeated. Unless you have the votes, and you don’t, all obstruct means is delay, and the chance to get some of that 80 pages of pure shit, out into the open.
Steve LaBonne
@Jay: Which is what they did, but we know that Democrats are always doing it wrong. Christ.
Jay
@Steve LaBonne:
They delayed the Bill for 16 hours, the Rethugs delayed the ACA for 14 days.
Matt McIrvin
@The Thin Black Duke: We saw from the George W. Bush administration that incompetence in stopping terrorist attacks is a political advantage.
Ksmiami
@Tim C: I hope gop voters die. Fast
Ksmiami
@Steve LaBonne: yes. Their voters will die off. Really.
Shakti
I am not sure what can be done to protect the vulnerable. As a pragmatic matter in order to vote people out, your base has to survive, vote, have those votes counted and the election upheld.
I haven’t the faintest idea how to bail out the water and patch the holes in the endless interim.
Pointless Sloganeering:
Make Americans Grovel Again
Make Americans Hurt Again
Department of Human Trafficking
Department of Homeland Insecurity
cat food conservatives
panty sniffing pickpockets
penny pinching perverts
Geminid
@Jay: So tell me when and how House Repulicans used these tactics you say they used when they were in opposition, and that Democrats failed to use now. This is not is not ancient history.
You might not might be in a position to say, but I remember the first time I saw this claim and the person making it claimed to know House procedure. But I noticed he never said when Republicans did this and how they did it. He just acted like this was common knowledge, but I followed those bills fairly closely and it was news to me.
Professor Bigfoot
@Steve LaBonne: I will note again for the record that it just seems like it’s always white guys with takes like this that invariably “I should be the one in charge!”
Steve LaBonne
@Jay: Absolute nonsense. The timeline was messed up, to the very limited extent that it was, by no longer having 60 Senate seats after Scott Brown’s election, making reconciliation with the House version more challenging. Maybe stick to Canadian politics where you might have some idea what you are taking about.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
ACA didn’t pass the Senate through reconciliation. It required 60 votes. There was a later reconciliation bill to make adjustments to the Senate bill.
Steve LaBonne
@Geminid: Democrats under Biden passed big time progressive legislation with the narrowest of margins, including Machinema in the Senate. But FSM forbid they ever get any credit for anything. I join a number of others here in being sick to death of this shit. It’s objectively pro-Republican.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Reconciliation between House and Senate versions, not Byrd rule budget reconciliation (some negotiations were required precisely to avoid the need for the latter). Make sure you understand the context of words before displaying your pedantry.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
Nope. I’m right. Because of Scott Brown’s election, the House was forced to pass the Senate bill. The House and Senate Dems agreed to a separate reconciliation bill to accommodate the House’s interests.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: That is what I just said. Again, the word “reconciliation” is not limited to the Byrd rule and budget bills, it also applies to what conference committees do to deal with different versions of a bill in the two houses. The House had to agree to pass the Senate version unaltered with the promise to address its concerns later via the Byrd rule. (None of this of course had anything to do with Republicans.)
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
Yes. We’re saying the same thing then.
Agreed. I think the whole process took about a week once the agreement was reached.
Geminid
@Baud: Speaking of Scott Brown, he’s running for Senate again, this time in New Hampshire.
Baud
@Geminid:
Why not?
Jay
@Geminid:
Unfortunately, Google is broken. 22 attempts at searches using variables Obama, ACA, Obamacare, obstruct, stall, Republicans, House, Senate, 2010 and various other search terms, only at best, returns to accounts from 2015, when Republicans first tried to repeal the ACA.
Even Wikipedia was of no help.
Geminid
@Jay: You do not have to go back that far. The last time House Republicans were in opposition was the 115th Congress, 2021 to 2023. The two big bills they could have obstructed or substantially delayed were the American Recovery Act and the IRA. I don’t recall them doing that, and that’s why I was suspicious the first time I saw someone make this claim.
I would have given an example; that wouldn’t have been hard, and he did not. But he was pushing this to a credulous audience already inclined to believe the “feckless Democrats” line, so he did not need to.
Chief Oshkosh
@Steve LaBonne: I’m surprised you and some others here can’t see the benefit to holding off the final vote until after the 4th.
Ah well, it’s a big ol’ world and there’s a lot of people in it.
Steve LaBonne
@Chief Oshkosh: Feel free to spell out the benefit. You’ll be the first to do so.