Remember when the GOP was OUTRAGED that women were supposedly having more children in order to get more welfare money?

And now they plan to offer women money to... have more children.

But it's a one-time payment, so is it *really* worth it?

The sanctions imposed on Russia have (along with the costs of a ruinously expensive war) brought their economy to the brink of collapse.
Are we now watching a race between oligarchs to see who can tank their economy completely first?

If you create tariffs that make it so that nobody wants to do business with you anymore, how is that different from self-imposed sanctions?

I think President Whitmore's speech in "Independence Day" was much more inspiring and capable of being fact-checked than Dear Leader's Liberation Day speech.

Just an FYI: 2 months ago, the US had the strongest economy on the planet. We had been driving the recovery from the pandemic for *everyone*.

It's no secret that a GOP administration *will* fuck up a strong economy. It's just the *speed* at which it's happening that's stunning *this time*.

"Trumpcession". Get used to the word, you'll be seeing it a lot.

"If we get rid of the FDA, food will become safer."
"If we get rid of FEMA, natural disasters will stop being as bad."
"If we get rid of NOAA, hurricanes will stop happening."
"If we get rid of educational standards, schools will be able to teach stuff that matters."

"If we stop vaccinating kids, infectious diseases will stop happening."
"If we fire everyone involved in safety inspections for aircraft and airports, we'll stop having airline safety issues."
"If we get rid of the EPA, pollution will stop affecting people."

"If we stop reporting about bird flu, it will stop being a problem."
"If we don't talk about a tuberculosis outbreak, it's not really happening."
"If we pretend that the world beyond the US borders is too far away to affect us, nothing that happens Out There matters."

I've been watching a lot of this oddness for awhile, and now I think I have enough examples to make a list:

"If we get rid of a large portion of our farm labor force, we won't have to pay so much for labor. That'll make food prices go down."

I can't see much daylight between this current "restructuring" and deliberate demolition.

And being a nasty suspicious sort, I wonder who benefits from a weakened divided bickering malnourished desperate US.

It's like they absolutely want chaos and dysfunction.

There was this idea in the Reagan era hat said that we need to make government small enough to drown in the bath tub, and that the government can't do anything right.

Well, when you're sabotaging it, I guess it wouldn't work right, would it?

WTF is it with the GOP and shutting down the government?

Refusing to pass budgets, so the government shuts down and threatens to go into default on the bills because [?].

"Freezing" all government payments, especially of paid-into benefits.

Congratulations, MAGA. I hope your moment of Being Cruel For The Sake of Being Cruel was worth it when a head of lettuce costs $10 (if you can get it at all).

Our unemployment is already low (thank you, Joe Biden!). We don't have this large pool of unemployed poor-folk bodies to force out into the fields. (Of course Dear Leader has a lot of ideas on how to create more poor people with no jobs.)

It took him less than a week to begin the disruptions of our food supply chain. This is the first step. Banning food imports, placing tariffs on agricultural machinery, and cancelling crop insurance and farm subsidies will be making the problem worse, not better.

ICE started raids yesterday.

Migrant workers aren't coming to work, because legal or not, who needs to spend a night in jail while papers get sorted out?

No migrant workers = food goes unharvested.

Food going unharvested = HIGHER FOOD PRICES DUE TO SCARCITY.

DID WE TELL YOU SO? YES. YES WE DID.

ABSOLUTELY hold the mainstream media accountable! Harass their response lines! Call their sponsors!

But if we throw the media baby out with the bathwater, all we're doing is feeding and watering the propaganda hyenas in the yard.

I would rather have a media source that does things like I want them to 50% of the time than leave the field of battle to the media that does things tragically and maliciously wrong 100% of the time.

I've been hearing a lot of "WHY ISN'T THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA AS OUTRAGED AS I AM ABOUT THIS?!?"

"Outrage" is what the right-wing media does. That's their stock in trade.

The right is already trying to make you distrust the MSM. Don't do their gaslighting for them.

99% of my online activity? It's on that one site. You know the one... Or if you don't know, there might be a reason.

No, it's not LJ. I miss LiveJournal. Don't you miss LiveJournal? Selling it to Russians was such a silly idea.

So Facebook, may the door hit ya where the Creator split ya.

Never had a use for Xitter. And now that it's a seething roiling bubo of reich-wing wankery, it's value to me is negative.

Mammoth and Tribel? I tried ya, I really did.

Here's to a new bluer sky.

I've never had that much of a presence on The Book of Faces, because The Algorithm kept piling too much garbage at my virtual doorstep. And now The Zuck has, in essence, stated that trans people can be treated as mentally ill, and that fact-checking is sooooo 2021.