"Elon Musk has now proved he's even stupider than Donald Trump. With the last gasp Musk-Trump redo of the original bipartisan bill to keep the government open, he's shown he doesn't understand how a bill is passed, the role of the Speaker, the role of the Senate or the President. But then they never taught those things in his South African elementary school that the rest of us learned here in the U.S. Worse for him, 38 Republicans voted against his bill despite being threatened with having their political lives killed.". With Lawrence O'Donnell, Last Word, last night on MSNBC
"If the government shuts down after midnight Friday, 1.3 million active-duty troops will go without pay, as will hundreds of thousands of civilian workers. National parks will close, air traffic and airports will be snarled over the holidays, food-safety inspection will be curtailed, tax refunds and operations at Social Security offices will be delayed, and millions of poor and working-class people will lose access to other government services. The shutdown will add billions of dollars to the debt. But Musk (net worth: $440 billion) will be just fine — and he is now the one directing the Republican agenda in Congress."- Dana Milbank, 'As Musk Forces A Shutdown The Trump presidency Is Already Collapsing Into Chaos', Washington Posy
"It’s not the Democratic Party’s job to convince the American people to not elect a fascist, racist, rapist, felon, insurrectionist security threat to the highest job in the nation. To imply otherwise is simply to infantilize half the nation. Half the country has decided that the rule of law is arbitrary and political, all politicians are crooks and care not a whit that a convicted felon and man found liable for sexual assault will occupy the office of the Presidency of the United States. They do so because they believe profit-seeking propaganda organs and buffoonish confidence men more than public institutions like governments, courts of law, and honest media." NY Times comment
We were already warned two years ago about the perils of letting the Reepturds run the government. This was thanks to Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, warning before the 2022 midterms about the cost of such folly, e.g. my post at the time:
As Mr. Luce noted:
"The only real damage the Republicans can wreak - if they gain control of congress - is if they follow through on their threat not to raise the U.S. debt ceiling. That could trigger a market crash."
Or a recession or even depression but certainly a credit downgrade or default. Yet a pack of dumb fuck, clueless voters actually believed a twice-impeached traitor, egomaniacal felon, congenital liar and braggart would be more "effective" in meeting their needs - so voted for the degenerate. And since Judge Juan Merchan has refused the Trump cabal's demands to remove his felon status - voted in a convicted felon as well. First time in American history. These dolts are now suddenly discovering - over the past few days - they also effectively voted in the South African oligarch Elon Musk as Trump's co-president. Don't believe it? Then why did Trump back him up after he first threatened to primary any congress critter that voted for the new bill to keep government open, avoiding a shutdown?
Back to the implications of a default arising from a shutdown. A U.S. default could trigger a worldwide financial crisis, possibly a depression. That’s because financial markets currently treat U.S. debt as the safest of assets, with all other assets around the world benchmarked against us. Our default would send waves of financial panic cascading through lots of other markets, too. If the government can’t borrow to pay bills that come due, it would have to suspend certain pension payments, withhold or cut the pay of soldiers and federal workers, or delay interest payments, which would constitute default. Unless Congress raises the debt ceiling, the Treasury could be forced to cut payments by more than 40%, including Social Security, VA benefits.
The pain is only now being glimpsed, as these MAGA predators make clear their intentions, including issuing bogus "reports" to try to implicate the January 6th commission members (such as Liz Cheney) in "crimes". But the pain is also going to come like thunder for the semi-educated loons that voted these pigs in as they see housing costs soar, as well as the prices of groceries and everything else from electronics to baby formula - thanks to Trump's planned tariffs. But see, that is the price of reaction - base instinctual mindless reaction to an economic and political environment - as opposed to thinking it through. Thinking through the down stream costs of putting into power a convicted felon and insurrectionist who ultimately is about himself, no one else.
As well as a know -nothing oligarch who had problems even getting a security clearance (in connection with Starlink, Space X projects) on account of his use of marijuana and ketamine. This drugged out dunce and twit - who thinks he can intrude on the separation of powers- and is already in possession of a swelled head ten times that of Dotard's.
Don't believe it? Remember Musk Rat single-handedly sunk the bipartisan spending bill Wednesday, wielding his powerful X account to pressure House Republicans to torpedo this bill. A critical lifeline that would have kept the federal government open for three months- and also would have delivered the $100 b in assistance victims of the hurricane disasters in TN, NC, VA have been waiting for. But now, thanks to the richest guy in the world, they're left to pound sand.
As WaPo columnist Dana Milbank noted:
"Musk, with an extended tantrum on his social media site X, successfully sabotaged the spending bill, which would have provided aid to farmers and disaster relief for storm-ravaged North Carolina, Florida and other parts of the country."
Musk also went wild yesterday posting one hundred false claims on X, including that congress was supposed to grab a 'criminal' 40 percent raise. Then on the social media site he owns, the brigand proceeded to trash the bill in an hours-long tirade, calling it “terrible,” “criminal,” “outrageous,” “horrible,” “unconscionable,” “crazy” and, ultimately, “an insane crime.” No, fuckface, the only "insane crime" is you traipsing through our glorious Capitol Bldg. despoiling it with every footfall.
But the good aspect of the latest effort to pass the Musk-Trump version of the spending bill, was seeing 38 Repubs (including Rep. Chip Roy (TX)) shoot it down - voting with the Dems to slay it on the spot. And that despite Musk's huff and puff on X to primary them and end their political careers. But despite his threats these 38 gave him the finger and a preview of what the next 4 years is likely to be like.
Still, given how Musk is throwing his weight (as well as $$$) around it's little wonder many are referring to this Turd as a "shadow president". Then - when I heard Bulwark contributor Sarah Longwell say on Deadline Whitehouse yesterday that "voters in focus groups" told her they voted Trump because "they wanted Musk too", I almost blew my top. How the fuck could so many goddamned idiots be so functionally illiterate, ignorant and pathetic at the same time? To believe a foreign born numbskull - who doesn't know squat about legislation or the Constitution- could be a sound advocate for stable government.
Maybe these same people - over the next four years - will finally learn the meaning of the phrase: "Repent at leisure" . Because that will be the name of the game for them.
See Also:
As Musk forces a shutdown, the Trump presidency is already collapsing into chaos
And:
And:
'Musk is an idiot': Chris Matthews launches scathing rant battering 'clown' Trump adviser
And:
by Robert Reich | December 19, 2024 - 6:52am | permalink
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
If the government shuts down Saturday, Elon Musk will be largely to blame.
Musk went on a daylong rampage yesterday against the continuing resolution drafted by House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team to keep the government going.
Musk posted nearly nonstop on his social media platform X about how lawmakers must kill it. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote in one post.
Musk — the richest person in the world — was joined in his posting spree by another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump asked to partner with Musk in an effort to slash government spending and reduce the federal budget deficit.
And:
by Heather Digby Parton | December 21, 2024 - 6:44am | permalink
Back in 2016, the whole country was left in shock when celebrity businessman Donald Trump managed to take over the Republican Party and win the presidential election. At the time there was quite a bit of resistance within the GOP establishment due to the fact that Trump had not run as an ordinary conservative but rather as a populist demagogue. They had no idea that their voters were so hungry for his message. Gone were all the usual paeans to small government and family values and even his strong advocacy for expanding the military was coupled with a discordant isolationist stance that harkened back to the pre-WWII America First movement. (Trump had no idea about that history — he thought he came up with it himself.)
However, he was all for tax cuts for the wealthy, which is the lifeblood of the Republican Party. And he was reflexively hostile to anything his predecessor Barack Obama ever did, which meant that he was willing to reverse much of the progress that had been made in the previous eight years, pleasing Republicans to no end.
And:
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
Today we don’t know if the United States government will shut down tomorrow because, first, Elon Musk followed by his co-president Donald Trump, persuaded House Republicans to vote against a compromise bill, and then, last night, Republicans couldn’t summon enough votes for a stripped-down continuing resolution because Trump insisted that it contain a measure lifting the debt ceiling.
This is not governing. Trump and the Republicans are not a governing party.
What’s the back story to all this? It’s the oligarchy that put Trump into the presidency.
A half-century ago, when America had a large and growing middle class, those on the “left” wanted stronger social safety nets and more public investment in schools, roads, and research. Those on the “right” sought greater reliance on the free market.
While House Republicans feud over the massive government spending bill that failed to pass on Thursday, another group of Republicans are facing a different kind of feud.
According to a new Politico report, MAGA allies are fighting "over the leadership of top Senate campaign groups" following Senator Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) exit from his role as the GOP's leader.
Per Politico, the "intraparty warfare" over "hiring at the National Republican Senatorial Committee and its allied GOP super PAC Senate Leadership Fund" has recently turned into "bickering over whether prospective new leaders are sufficiently loyal to Trump and the movement he created."
Some staunch Donald Trump allies, according to the report, are making "private efforts to undermine" Brendan Jaspers — who was just named political director of NRSC for the 2026 midterms.
"Smoke smoke smoke that cigarette
And if you smoke yourself to death
Tell St Peter at the Golden Gate
That you hate to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette."
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she didn’t want to accept that diagnosis. No one ever does, of course, but knowing my mom as I did, I soon realized that as a woman who smoked unfiltered Pall Malls or Chesterfields from the time she was teenage girl, she just didn’t want to be responsible for her own potential demise. She didn’t want her cancer to be her own damn fault.
I was already glad about the upcoming TikTok ban, but now I have one more reason to be happy about it: the site's minitrend of women "pranking" their husbands by saying, "I can't pay the mortgage this month." The "joke" is that the husband reacts with confusion because his wife doesn't contribute to the house payment. The goal isn't humor, though, but bragging. A woman who posts this content wants us to believe she's such a sexual dynamo she's snagged a man who is willing to pay all her bills. What's ignored is the entire history of women's financial dependence on men, which is actually about men's domination over women, not women's sexual power over men. Or the ways that women who don't have money of their own are so often trapped, abused or abandoned into poverty.
The "can't pay the mortgage" meme is just the latest in a series of social media trends that romanticize female submission to men. There are also "soft girls" and "stay-at-home girlfriends," working the same "too sexy to work" schtick. (The old term for this role, of course, is "kept woman," especially if your sugar daddy has a wife he goes home to after visiting you in his sidepiece apartment.) The biggest of all are the "tradwives": influencers who peddle idyllic images of housewifery, where women's equality is rejected in favor of obsequiousness and exaggerated domesticity. Some tradwives, like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, avoid explicit denunciations of feminism, simply presenting their lifestyle as a "choice" among many. Others are more overtly political, putting out rants about how feminists must all be miserable cat ladies. But they all are based on the false promise that self-abasement before men is a woman's happiness.
Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger is wondering out loud if “President Musk” will force “Vice President Trump” and Speaker Mike Johnson to shut down our government as Musk tweets his orders to the GOP. It’s all about raising the debt ceiling, Trump says, so they can roll out the next round of tax cuts for billionaires, paid for by average working people.
It seems like a bizarre power play: The actual story is much more sinister.
As Trump is in the process of teaching America, it’s impossible to disentangle democracy-ending authoritarianism from billionaire corruption of government. They require each other.
And the way this will play out won’t need a crystal ball to see: Trump has already begun traveling a well-trod path that leads to the destruction of our form of government.
So, why did Donald Trump win? Or to put it another way, why did the American people decide to elect as their president one of the most despicable and dangerous human beings ever to dance (or perhaps trample would be a better word) through the pages of American political history? It isn’t as though we didn’t know what we were getting with Donald Trump. During his previous four years in the White House, he engaged in self-dealing, advocated violence, and embraced extremist groups including neo-Nazis, a group who, in his view, includes some “very fine people.”
When faced with a deadly pandemic, he deliberately understated the danger for political advantage, suppressed scientific data, delayed testing, discouraged mask wearing, and advocated fake cures and other nonscientific nonsense. According to studies in peer-reviewed journals, thousands of Americans may have died unnecessarily because of these actions.
Trump has also never been shy about sharing his plans to use federal law enforcement officers, taxing agencies, and prosecutors to act as his personal avengers. These are public servants he intends to morph into an army of thugs paid for by the taxpayers and available at his whim. He has also been remarkably forthcoming in describing his lust for dictatorial powers.
by Omar Ocampo and A.J. Schumann
Texas’ electrical grid made national headlines in the winter of 2021 when the state experienced statewide power outages. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT—the state’s power grid operator—was caught completely off-guard when a winter storm exposed the organization’s lack of severe weather preparedness. Embarrassed, ERCOT developed a roadmap to increase the reliability of its energy delivery system.
But guaranteeing a reliable flow of energy from the state’s generating plants to the homes and businesses of Texan residents has proven more difficult than expected. ERCOT recently announced that if a comparable storm were to hit the Lone Star State this winter, there is an 80% chance that they would again experience blackouts during peak hours.
Failure to resolve Texas’ power grid bottlenecks is perhaps not entirely ERCOT’s fault. Demand for energy in the state has ballooned in recent years thanks, in part, to the explosion and hype around artificial intelligence.
— from the Brennan Center for Justice
Many things propelled Donald Trump’s election victory. Inflation. A worldwide anti-incumbent backlash. Anger at institutions. A swing to the right among working-class voters of all racial backgrounds. And more. Analysts are still chewing on all the data (and Democrats are chewing on each other).
As we sift through the results and look forward, Republican control of the House of Representatives will matter greatly. That control is very, very narrow. And it turns out to rest on a shaky foundation of gerrymandering and manipulated maps, all encouraged by the Supreme Court.
The last time a new president took office without a “trifecta” of House and Senate control was 35 years ago. But this will be the slimmest House majority on record. With yesterday’s announcement by Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz that she will not participate in the Republican caucus, control may effectively come down to one vote.
This summer, the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling made it much easier for local governments to criminalize homelessness. Since then, cities and states across the country have stepped up their harassment of people for the “crime” of not having a place to live.
Penalizing homelessness has increasingly taken the form of crackdowns on encampments — also known as “sweeps,” which have received bipartisan support. California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered state agencies to ramp up encampment sweeps, while President-elect Donald Trump has also pledged to ban encampments and move people to “tent cities” far from public view.
Evidence shows that these sweeps are harmful and unproductive — and not to mention dehumanizing.
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
If the government shuts down Saturday, Elon Musk will be largely to blame.
Musk went on a daylong rampage yesterday against the continuing resolution drafted by House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team to keep the government going.
Musk posted nearly nonstop on his social media platform X about how lawmakers must kill it. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote in one post.
Musk — the richest person in the world — was joined in his posting spree by another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump asked to partner with Musk in an effort to slash government spending and reduce the federal budget deficit.
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