Turning On The Giant Faucet Of Bullshit - US Politics February 2025

waiting for Surgeon General Dr. Phil to outlaw medicine and replace with a regimen of tough love and boot camp

Replacing political appointees from a previous administration with your own appointees is standard operating practice. It's expected. What's insane is how Trump's taken so many actions to decapitate the federal government and bring everything to a screeching halt with zero regard for the repercussions. It's the psychology of a mass shooter, not a political leader.

I was replying to:

Trump just fired Chopra the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

hope u guys like stagflation

black market chickens, gigacock eggz brah

Canada has announced 25% tariffs on US imports effective this week.

Also pulling products from red states off shelves where they can

At least all those Democrats tried to block Rubio’s confirmation.

Oh, wait. Not a single fucking one did. Even Bernie Sanders is fine with that asshole

my province NS is removing all american alcohol from its liquor stores. all liquor stores are owned by the province so that's effectively a ban.

What’s the over/under on another Great Depression? 6 months?

American liquor is shit, anyway. Except for maybe my Mr. Black espresso martini mix

people are gonna buy up all the moosehead...

American liquor is shit, anyway.

Do you ever tire of being the most wrong, acerbic asshole on this board?

Canadian beer is like moonshine

No, I don’t tire of it. It’s so easy to annoy thin-skinned idiots who spend too much time here like you

Beer makes you fat. Why would I want to be fat like you yanks?

Pictures, plz.

Can we ban this dickhead already?

Adding to the "federal employees are getting abused" posts, a friend of mine almost replied to one of those ghoulish emails about their job status with both the video where both Don and Jeffrey Epstein are pointing at underage girls, and several pics of Elmo Muskrat before his own gender-affirming surgery on his scalp and chin (I throw no shade at people who choose such options, only at transphobic fucksticks). She refrained. But maybe we all should just flood every fucking social media platform with those!

table otm

table OTM

jinx!

I don't even drink anymore but I will not hear this Tito's slander. It's cheap without burning and makes people more palatable.

amen

table otm

flagged

Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office has received “many, many” calls about trans people’s struggles to update their passports in the last two weeks, a source familiar with the issue told The Standard Friday.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Jan. 20 declaring that the U.S. government would recognize only two sexes. The order also bars people from changing their gender on federal documents.

Nevada Nubes, a trans person who lives in the Mission, said the passport agency denied their request to update their name and issue a new passport showing their gender as X, citing the executive order.

Nubes said they mailed in their passport Jan. 24 to update their name, which they recently legally changed.

“They said they could only give me my passport with my updated name, and then my gender that was assigned to me at birth,” Nubes said. But the office later said it couldn’t even do that. “They’re holding my documents, and I’m not able to travel.”

When Nubes asked for the old passport back, the office was unable to produce it. As a result, they had to cancel a Friday flight to Mexico to visit a friend who is dying of AIDS.

https://sfstandard.com/2025/01/31/trans-passport-gender-donald-trump-executive-order/

The entire system for applying/renewing/replacing passports appears to be down since yesterday: "Passport Application System is undergoing maintenance".

I'm sure its fine

F.A.A.’s Main Warning System for Pilots Is Down, U.S. Official Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/us/notam-outage-faa-alerts.html

probably nothing....

My mom's supposed to be leaving for her annual two-week trip to Mexico on Tuesday. I'm wondering if a) her flight will leave at all (will travel to Mexico still be legal by then?); b) it will arrive safely; c) if they'll let her back into the USA afterwards (her last name is Guevara).

Elon Musk says he's going to be shutting down federal grants (which he called "illegal payments") to Lutheran Services providers. https://bsky.app/profile/bubbaprog.lol/post/3lh77ekgdas2h

Similar to Catholic Charities, this is a network of 300 health and human service nonprofits that claims to reach 1 in 50 Americans each year. It "advances equitable outcomes for children, youth and families, improves independence and choice for older adults, champions meaningful services and support for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and strengthens stability and purpose for veterans, refugees, new Americans and more."

It also has a 100% rating on Charity Navigator.

I guess it’s a good thing for them that nothing this administration does is considered illegal, what with these stupid motherfuckers advertising their crimes on X.

i mean, last time i was often criticized for freaking out too much about blatantly ridiculous, short-sighted, and idiotic decisions made by the trump administration.

this time things seem way more extreme but is it? these decisions --- the tarriffs and the cuts to grants --- seem like the kind of thing that will cause very blatant and obvious catastrophes that can clearly be traced back to them. is this what is going to happen?

the tariffs are interesting to me because capital mobility seems very important to people like jeff bezos. and yet these are the people standing behind him now.

there is something i am not seeing.

My take is that Trump is using the tariffs to distract the media while Elon loots the Treasury. I’ve seen plenty of articles about the tariffs, but not nearly enough about Musk’s fuckery.

why does trump want elon to loot the treasury

the whole situation is bizarre. a firehose of radical policy changes, many unconstitutional and quickly struck down by judges

yeah this is kind of what pisses me off the most, every single Trump voter I know calls us hysterical for even suggesting he would do half the shit he did in his first 2 weeks. like how much were they crying over the Project 2025 stuff, or saying "you call everyone Hitler", fucking cowards all of them. whatever happens, they own all this shit

so, take the tariffs. if it causes a major crash, this will be blamed on biden.

if they somehow do not --- if the tariffs work out and helps spur a renaissance of domestic manufacturing --- then that means i do not understand how things work.

it seems ridiculous to be antagonizing canada and mexico for no reason. this doesn't seem like a targeted plan to encourage onshoring through tariffs, it's just chaotic.

call me naive but I think Trump actually will take the blame for this

The thing that sucks is it’s a deliberate goal of these fucks to force a reaction through protests and then declare the Insurrection Act and crush them with violence.

so trump and elon are both deeply disturbed mentally. elon apparently is a heavy user of ketamine and you can sort of tell he is "off" in recent appearances.

Xxxp to Frogbs even those supposed hard nosed capitalists at JP Morgan were like “he’s not going to do tariffs don’t worry” and now they are “whoa we weren’t expecting that!!!”

I just want these peoples’ lifestyles to catch up with them if you catch my drift

this is sort of a point i would make a lot on ilx in 2016 and perhaps annoyingly so. but i guess then there were some brakes on him? so he would say crazy stuff but much of the government sort of chugged along normally?

xp to myself

The North American automobile manufacturing sector, which is highly integrated with Canada, was predicted by an industry representative to crash within the week. Whether that's an exaggeration is to be seen. Watch the markets on opening tomorrow to see the degree of nervousness.

"beta cuck" is so the opposite of words or things i ever think about these days, so i can see how, if that's what's animating and inspiring the current "GOP" (they're not the GOP anymore, or they always were, same difference), then....you know what, even then, i think i will go ahead and say that yes, i think even then they would rally behind such a beta cuck. that just gives them cover to do what they're already doing, because even though it makes half the country vomit, the other half would bring that guy straight home to mom and be so proud of their godly warrior

― z_tbd, Friday, February 28, 2025 3:54 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the problem that he and every other GOP toady has once Trump's out of the picture is they spent so much time fellating him in public and were willing to shed every moral and political belief they had in order to curry favor with him, I don't think being such a shameless bootlicker ever really brings you that kind of power. Vance ain't gonna rally the MAGA dipshits, he's way too much of an awkward debate club nerd, he's not gonna be able to sell the "nobody's laughing at us anymore!" shit to his base like Trump does

I forgot canada is in there as well

February 7, 2025 - Canada reaffirms commitment to NATO’s collective defence and security and welcomes Sweden to the Canadian-led NATO Multinational Brigade Latvia

“Does JD Vance pick fights with second graders and gloat about it?”

Punching down is a huge part of their approach. So yes he would do that if Trump told him to.

Republican voters squealed in delight when Trump mocked a handicapped person in 2016, so yeah

seems like Vance has been playing second-fiddle to Musk so he wanted to make a show of it, to get into Trump's graces again

I generally avoid political commentary, but that meeting reminded me of the scene in Chernobyl where the plant boss berates one of the engineers who is dying of radiation poisoning. The plant boss can't accept that anything could be wrong. "You couldn't have seen graphite, you're lying".

I mention it because Zelensky has a very bleak future if he doesn't win the war.

Trump thinks it is amusing to contemplate what Putin will do to Zelensky and his family. Losers, right?

Trump is mentally deranged and psychopathic. I don’t really see a way out of this for America and the world right now. He will do significant damage and people will die.

People who believe a new multipolar world order will come out of this are deluded. Major decisions are being guided by one lunatic and his random and sadistic intuitions.

People already have died.

xp Biden has been gone for a few months now.

I know David Brooks is not beloved around here, but he's damn near weeping about the WH meeting today on PBS News Hour

I can't stand that turd, but I watched him and Capehart last Friday, which I never do because fuck him, and he seemed as close to despair as most people here

Honest question: after their misadventure in Ukraine, does Russia currently have the capacity to try and take over other countries? I suppose the Baltic nations are quite small but still.

Most European countries don't really have any defense capacity of their own, NATO is effectively in name only, and I think any form of collective European defence or NATO replacement is unlikely. Turkiye have a strong interest in preventing the Black Sea from becoming a Russian lake, and I think are currently Ukraine's best hope for support

Also I think depends on timeframe, capacity today and capacity tomorrow are different things especially if we're talking over the next decade rather than year, and at what point sanctions on Russia start to get lifted

too little too late for Brooks, just another traitor finally getting thrown under the bus

Brooks is really horrible but you have to be something worse than really horrible to approve of trump and vance’s performance today. This means almost all republicans in congress are worse than really horrible.

Watching it again, Trump seemed especially offended by Zelensky’s criticism of Putin. And he said that Putin “went through” the Russiagate scandal “with” Trump. Like what the fuck

treesh in all seriousness I have a book recommendation 4 u

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/560830.My_Name_is_Chellis_and_I_m_in_Recovery_from_Western_Civilization

They survived the Biden Bathroom Offensive together.

I get that USAID wasn’t perfect, but their work fighting malaria, aids, and tuberculosis was a good thing. So my wife and I did the least we could today and showed up and cheered USAID employees who had been fired and were given 15 minutes slots today to clear their personal belongings out of the Reagan Building office some of them were in. . My wife and others gave them flowers too. Anti- Musk signs were waved too. I get that this might sound corny lib resistance to some, but it felt like the right thing to do to us.

"we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for."

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/ten-reasons-for-optimism

This feels like 1919 in an alternative timeline

We need a new thread in which to vent our anger and anguish over the state of (mostly) national politics in the USA for the month of March.

Do you even own a suit?

There's a whole administration's worth of thread titles in that press conference.

Before we close up this one, I just want to say that 29 days ago when I merged two Trumpisms* for this thread title I really had no idea how fully and completely apt it would be.

*The California water thing and him describing Mayor Pete's "Great line of bullshit" during the post-DC plane crash presser.

Putting this here even though it's March. The backlash is real.

Senator Marshall (R-KS) RUNS AWAY, fleeing his own town hall after being asked about DOGE firing Veterans. MAKE HIM GO VIRAL.

https://bsky.app/profile/muellershewrote.bsky.social/post/3ljdjznddic2m

note that the second line in my post is taken from the bsky post, it's not mine

I bet most of the people in that room voted for Trump. Now they are shocked to discover that the face-eating leopards they voted for are going to eat people's faces indiscriminately!!

Magical, Alluring, Galvanizing, Adventurous: US Politics March 2025