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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Republican Stupidity

Republican Stupidity

House Bill Passes (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  May 22, 20257:37 am| 183 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Sports

According to WaPo, Trump’s big ugly bill narrowly passed in the House a little while ago and is now headed to the Senate. Here’s the summary from the linked article:

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, as the measure is formally known, extends trillions of dollars in tax cuts from his first term along with new campaign promises — including no taxes on tips and overtime wages — and hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending.

But the legislation, carries a hefty price tag. The latest projection from Congressional Budget Office, lawmakers’ nonpartisan bookkeeper, showed it will add $2.4 trillion over 10 years to the national debt, which already exceeds $36 trillion.

To offset the cost, the measure would slash spending on social safety net programs by more than $1 trillion over 10 years. Even then, the mammoth legislation could also force nearly $500 billion in cuts to Medicare over the next decade to keep the national deficit within legal limits, unless Congress later adjusts the limits. The legislation could strip Medicaid coverage from 8.7 million people and lead to 7.6 million more uninsured people over 10 years, CBO projected.

To sum up, billionaires like Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc., get to keep NOT paying their fair share of taxes, and ordinary citizens who depend on Medicare, Medicaid and other programs get screwed. Same as it ever was when Repubs hold power, only worse because Trump makes everything worse.

The retiree ceremonial head of state took a brief break from golf and crypto grifting yesterday to lean on House Repubs to get the bill passed. But elected Repubs interpreted Trump’s incoherent and uniformed comments on the bill in ways that confirm their priors.

In the meeting, the president scolded blue-state Republicans seeking a higher cap on state and local tax deductions (SALT), and he chided GOP hard-liners not to “f— around with Medicaid” benefits. A consensus, lawmakers said, appeared in the offing.

But lawmakers raced to put their own spin on Trump’s words. To some, the president’s comments about SALT meant refusing to raise the tax deduction, and to others, he meant accepting moderates’ demands.

To one group, his remarks about Medicaid meant searching for only egregious abuses, while another handful thought it meant finding “waste” within the program’s DNA.

A similar dynamic will probably take hold in the Senate, where a modified version of a bill that screws working people in favor of billionaires will almost certainly pass. At the policy level, right-wing “populism” is indistinguishable from the plutocratic agenda, as it was in Trump’s first term.

When millions lose healthcare, when rural hospitals close and nursing homes nationwide are shuttered, when seniors can’t access the benefits they’ve paid into for decades, etc., Trump will either ignore the situation or claim ignorance. Pretending not to know what’s happening under their own watch is a hallmark of the Trump cabinet, and it comes from the top.

I’ll contact my shitty Republican senators today to register my objections, but it feels entirely pointless. Because it is. The only thing we can do is ride this nightmare out and try to shift the balance of power through the next elections. Depressing!

***

I played hooky yesterday to attend the Tampa Bay Rays baseball game. They beat the Houston Astros 8 to 4, so the curse is lifted! (The curse was that the Rays lost every game my sister and I attended.)

Last year’s hurricanes shredded the dome at Tropicana Field in St. Pete, so this year, the team is playing at the New York Yankee’s spring training facility in Tampa, a much smaller and open air venue.

Lord, it was HOT! I’m not used to watching baseball outdoors since the Rays have played in a dome since their inception. I applied sunblock copiously and wore a hat, but I still got fried. Our plastic stadium chairs were so hot we had to pour water on them to avoid scorching our butts.

We entertained ourselves during lulls in the baseball action by watching unwary fans arrive late, sit down in their blazing hot seats and then leap up fanning their flaming hot tushes. We agreed that for the rest of the season, we’ll consider attending night games only.

Open thread!

House Bill Passes (Open Thread)Post + Comments (183)

Saving Biomedical Research (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  May 19, 20253:38 pm| 72 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity

Josh Marshall published a member newsletter at TPM the other day on the topic of how to save American biomedical research. It’s long but worth a read. Here’s a gift link. I’ll include an excerpt below, but in a nutshell, Marshall says the draconian cuts Republicans are making to biomedical research are happening largely under the radar and that it’s urgent to get the word out now.

Every major disease affecting Americans has what we might call a disease community built up around it. These are a mix of survivors, people suffering from the disease, family members, loved ones and caregivers. To a lesser degree, it involves clinicians and those in the caring fields. Sometimes those communities are strongly tied to the quasi-official fund-raising and public awareness organization to the specific disease. But sometimes they’re not. The key is that these aren’t top-down organizations. They’re genuine mass membership organizations and even movements. Often there are a handful of different organizations. But the point is these communities are out there, regardless of precisely how they’re constituted. They’re made up of people who care deeply about the issue and who can make their voices heard. I first started thinking about this when I was speaking to a former NIH researcher and he mentioned to me how he was about to do a Zoom meeting open to members of a breast cancer–focused organization in a mid-sized to large state. Just in that one state and focused on that one (albeit common) disease, the group had about 80,000 members.

Something clicked in my head. And when I did some more poking around, I learned that what’s happening at NIH and in biomedical research generally was only just beginning to make itself known in these disease communities. Put these two things, these two groups, together — the researchers who know what’s happening and the disease communities who need to know — and it’s like a spark in a room filled with gas fumes.

This is really the entire story. I’ve written in other posts about how we’ve learned over recent months that the modern American university is simply not equipped for this kind of assault. It lacks the tools and experience. I’ve described the challenges the researchers have communicating with the broader public. But these people — the people in the disease communities — are all people who speak human. There are lots and lots of them. They will show up at town halls. In their nature, they transcend ordinary political divisions. This is what has to happen. When the people in the world of biomedical research — let’s cut the technical language: disease cure research — make sustained contact with the people in each of these dozen or so disease communities and help them understand what’s happening, that’s the point when I think everything will change.

But will it happen?

And how soon?

I don’t know if this will happen or the timeline, but from what I hear from my contacts in that community, time is running out. The damage is already considerable, and remember, no one asked for this. So, it’s a vulnerability for Republicans if it can be communicated effectively.

I’m not really a “joiner,” so I don’t participate in any groups that have to do with my particular health issue. But I do still get treatment, and I’m thinking of making some flyers to hang in facility bathroom stalls, etc., urging anyone who sees it to access the facts about the cuts and call their federal representatives to object to it. Other suggestions welcome!

Open thread.

Saving Biomedical Research (Open Thread)Post + Comments (72)

MAHA Slap Fight! (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  May 13, 202510:37 am| 170 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity

As long time readers of this space know, I have the political instincts of a concussed garden snail, so no one should ever pay any mind to my predictions of what’s going to happen in an election. I confidently predicted the elections of both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

Going back decades, I’ve backed the wrong horse in every Democratic primary with one exception: Barack Obama. So it’s no surprise that among the many things I didn’t see coming, I utterly failed to comprehend the danger when Trump’s MAGA movement merged with RFK the Lesser’s woo-woo kooks last year.

In my defense, at first blush, it made for a seemingly unwieldy base coalition, crunchy granola types who haunt dairy farms and fondle cows for raw milk united with human truck-nuts who subsist on bags of pork cracklings dipped in convenience store nacho sauce. I failed to see what they had in common, which is a propensity to credulously swallow the dumbest conspiracy theories. It was enough, damn it.

But now it looks like the cells within that malignant coalition are busily dividing, and with any luck, maybe that will kill the rotten host eventually. Here’s an excerpt from Michelle Goldberg’s NYT column on a MAHA spat that broke out when Kennedy recommended wellness quack Casey Means for surgeon general.

Means is a close ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the secretary of health and human services. Yet much of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement has revolted against her nomination. It’s a rift that underscores the instability of a political coalition built on paranoia, distrust and the dogged pursuit of social media clout.

Among the loudest voices railing against Means is Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist who has achieved an outsize role in some of Trump’s personnel decisions. In a post on X, she zeroed in on Means’s new age spiritual practices, detailed in a 2024 newsletter article Means wrote about finding love at 35. The surgeon general nominee described working with a medium, doing full moon ceremonies and “plant medicine experiences,” and asking for help from trees. Loomer called her a crackpot and warned, without a trace of irony, “The inmates are running the asylum!”

Loomer! Calling someone else a crackpot!

Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan suggested RFK Jr. is being controlled by his siblings. Naomi Wolf (the nutty Naomi, not the Klein) thinks Means and her wellness entrepreneur brother, who also works at HHS, are CIA plants. RFK Jr.’s pushback is just making things worse, according to Goldberg:

Kennedy has responded to these attacks by accusing Means’s detractors of being paid shills for big food, which, as you can probably imagine, has made some of them even angrier. For decades, he’s been telling people that monstrous totalitarian powers control the medical system. In the subculture he’s helped build, scientific knowledge is found not in peer-reviewed articles, but down internet rabbit holes, and all appeals to authority are necessarily suspect. Now the dark energies he’s manifested are coming back to haunt him.

That’s the downside of the do-your-own-research methodology that rejects science and expertise. There’s no pursuit of truth, only clout chasing, and those who become “authorities” under that rotten system will be in the sights of the next band of kooks looking to tear down “the establishment.”

Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

Open thread!

MAHA Slap Fight! (Open Thread)Post + Comments (170)

Confederacy of Malevolent Dingleberries (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  May 9, 20257:30 am| 156 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality

There are probably obvious historical parallels I’m overlooking, and it’s trite, but to me, the Trump cabinet brings to mind an assemblage of Batman villains. That’s the comparison that leaps to mind every time to capture the scope of this cabinet’s venality, derangement, obsequiousness and campish evil.

They’re all awful, but can you pick just one who’s the worst of that extremely bad bunch? It’s hard!

There’s the catcher’s mitt-faced, nepo-baby woo-peddler with a serial killer vibe and a deeply creepy fixation on people with autism. The drunken sex pest who imagines himself a “warfighter” while telegraphing classified operations to all and sundry.

There’s the utterly corrupt hack who eagerly converted the DOJ into a law firm for and enforcement arm of the ruling right-wing kleptocracy.

And then there’s the botoxed, veneered puppy shooter who’s in charge of our most unwieldy and Teutonic-sounding federal agency: the Department of Homeland Security.

Kristi Noem appeared before a committee to answer questions about her agency’s budget yesterday, and hoo boy, was Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) lying in wait to read her for filth:

Murphy’s point about the asylum law and its origins needs to be made more often. If Republicans don’t like the asylum law, they should try to change it through legislative channels, but ignoring it is unconstitutional, as Murphy made clear.

To end on a shallow note, I like whiskers on men, so I am pleased to see that Murphy has a beard now, as does Sec. Pete Buttigieg. Since we apparently can’t have a woman president, can we at least elect a man with a beard next time?

(To clarify, I mean let’s do that as long as the bearded prez is not the hirsute, eye-liner wearing, Cabbage Patch kid-looking, Pope-slaying couch-fucker, a fraction of a man whose sainted Meemaw should rise from the grave to thrash into a coma with an extension cord. Obviously.)

Open thread!

Confederacy of Malevolent Dingleberries (Open Thread)Post + Comments (156)

Shithouse Vanna White (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  May 8, 20257:47 am| 268 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) is horrible in all the ways Trump-era Republicans are typically awful. She’s a phony. She’s loudly, aggressively and confidently wrong, chasing clout with performative “tough girl” cosplay while also being a dissembling coward.

Mace lies a lot. She’s mean, and she revels in cruelty. So far, that’s bog-standard Trumpling behavior.

And yet there’s something extra-twisted about Mace. Some quality about her that transcends standard GOP depravity and seems to explore subterranean passages that lie beneath the garden variety Republican careerists’ two-lane path of degeneracy and hypocrisy.

There’s the bizarre and inappropriate oversharing at Tim Scott’s prayer breakfast. The “scorched earth” accusations she lodged on the House floor against her former fiancé and others. Her “fuck your feelings” bravado in one breath and “how dare you” retreat into victimhood in the next.

Anyway, to this casual politics observer, Mace’s behavior to-date on the public stage indicates she may flame out in a particularly lurid way in the future, and I’m so here for that.

In the meantime, what an asshole:

some people go on vacations to sightsee and go on beautiful hikes but nancy mace flies around the country looking at bathrooms

[image or embed]

— onion person (@junlper.beer) May 7, 2025 at 3:09 PM

It’s not a one-off, apparently. This weirdo just hangs around lots of public restrooms, studying pictograms and presenting them with a flourish to social media followers to farm outrage. Bizarre.

i genuinely cannot believe how many pictures nancy mace has taken outside of bathrooms while she travels

[image or embed]

— onion person (@junlper.beer) May 7, 2025 at 7:23 PM

Kevin Kruse on Bluesky calls her the “Vanna White of shitters,” and that’s so perfect.

Open thread!

Shithouse Vanna White (Open Thread)Post + Comments (268)

Constituent Service (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  May 7, 20253:00 pm| 174 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity

Republican town halls that go off the rails are my favorite news genre these days, so when I saw this photo on Bluesky featuring a then-unidentified woman flashing peace signs while cops carried her out of Mike Lawler’s (R-NY) town hall, I was immediately interested in the backstory.

Photo of cops carrying a woman out of a town hall while she flashes peace signs.

Now we have it, thanks to Mother Jones reporter Julianne McShane. An excerpt:

(Emily Feiner) was one of several people forcibly removed by state troopers after asking Lawler what it would take for him to stand up to the Trump administration. The moment, which was caught on video and quickly went viral on social media, serves as the latest example of Republican lawmakers endorsing seemingly drastic measures to silence calls for accountability from the constituents they represent…

But Lawler’s apparent efforts to stamp out dissent quickly unraveled. “I asked [Lawler], given all the unconstitutional acts by this administration, did he have a red line, and what was it?” Feiner told me. “Because he’s done nothing yet, while presenting himself as a moderate, to indicate that he is, in any way, going to act as a check on this administration.”

According to Feiner and a friend who filmed the incident and was also removed from the event, Jennifer Cabrera, who is also chair of the local chapter of the Working Families Party, Lawler did not directly answer the question, and instead started talking about the appropriations process. So Feiner called out: “Answer the question, answer the question.”

After that, the cops dragged Feiner out. Here’s a brief interview with the ejected constituent that MoJo posted on Bluesky:

“I think this says that they will not tolerate us being active participants in our democracy—they want an autocracy,” Emily Feiner told Mother Jones.

Meet the 64-year-old retired social worker who went viral after being forcibly removed from her representative’s town hall.

[image or embed]

— Mother Jones (@motherjones.com) May 6, 2025 at 4:45 PM

More from the linked article:

Authorities also reportedly removed attendees from recent town halls held by Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has reportedly told members to skip in-person town halls after many were met by protesters demanding accountability in the early weeks of Trump’s term, baselessly alleging that those who were showing up were “professional protesters.”

Feiner—who, for the record, says she is not a paid protester—says that even if Republicans stop showing up, defenders of democracy should not. “Everybody doesn’t have to do what I do, but everybody has a role: Be a body, be there. Let your elected representative know that you care, that you’re watching.”

She’s right. We gotta keep showing up.

Open thread.

Constituent Service (Open Thread)Post + Comments (174)

May Day (Open Thread)

by Betty Cracker|  May 1, 202511:05 am| 157 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity

May Day poster with raised fists representing worker power

Anyone going to a May Day protest today? (Wish I could, but I can’t.)

Here’s a link to Indivisible’s May Day page, which has a searchable list of more than 1,000 events. Here’s how the organization describes the purpose on this May Day:

Trump and his billionaire profiteers are trying to create a race to the bottom—on wages, on benefits, on dignity itself. This May Day we are fighting back. We are demanding a country that puts our families over their fortunes—public schools over private profits, healthcare over hedge funds, prosperity over free market politics.

Although much of the world celebrates International Workers Day on May 1st, May Day fell out of favor in the USA because Cold Warriors detected a whiff of commie. I agree with the LOL GOP fellow from Bluesky when he says, “if the GOP gets to be led by a KGB agent, we get May Day back.”

***

Like many year-round Florida residents, I dread summer. May 1st for me marks the end of stone crab season (boo!) and a preview of the long, hot season of suffocating heat and humidity to come. And possibly hurricanes. So, not a fan.

But on the bright side, this is the time of year when lots of snowbirds decamp, so there’s less traffic and competition for seats at the local tiki bars. Bill informs me that our MAGA dope neighbor is migrating back home soon, so I’ve got that going for me.

***

Here’s one for the “You’ve Got to Hand It to Them” file:

sometimes you do have to hand it to them

[image or embed]

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) May 1, 2025 at 9:05 AM

Backstory in case you missed it: When asked about possible toy shortages due to his dumb tariff pissing contest with China, Trump said, “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.” (YouTube)

Yep, this person actually said that.

Open thread.

May Day (Open Thread)Post + Comments (157)

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