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

Ugh, I'm sorry table. Hope he makes it through this madness okay.

so do we file taxes this year or is Elon in IRS too?

i'm pretty sure paying taxes is just something suggested to do now. like giving to charity. its not the law or anything.

The "Freedom Isn't Free" sect are always the loudest with the bitching about paying taxes.

Trump, Hosting Israel’s Leader, Says Palestinians Should Leave Gaza

“They have no alternative right now” but to leave, President Trump said shortly before he welcomed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

will democrats say anything? will this be their first time trying to do anything to stop the genocide, now that biden is out of office?

i could be wrong but it almost seems like most elected democrats are fine with it, and they'd probably agree with trump if it would make the problem they made worse go away

thankfully we knew before the election that Biden's Israel policies were so bad that Trump could not possibly be worse.

its not like Jared didnt float razing Gaza and building high-end beach-front property or anything

Looks like a pretty sizable protest outside the Treasury right now, glad to see something.

Democrats are starting to say things. (Whether that’s enough, or whether they’ll go further, remains to be seen.)

Saying things outside of federal buildings, even.

Federal buildings that they can't get into despite being actual public officials.

the clips of the protest that I'm seeing are fairly lively, Dems are getting punchy little by little

Tables, my sympathy for what your uncle is going through. (He and I and Heez and a few other posters and/or their relatives share something in common, if you follow me.)

it's hard to imagine that we aren't going to have a country full of extremely pissed off people in short order if things continue to collapse like this

Trump just said the U.S. is going to take over the Gaza Strip, once those 2-plus million people are gone.

Whooee.

Personally I can't see this stuff dispassionately because of my gov-adjacent bubble, but I can clearly see a lot of messaging on the web of "good!" And "It's about time" wrt the fear and pain of my townspeople.

I know he's just a babbling wheezebag but jeez fucking christ already

Trump once again says Gaza is a “demolition site” that is “very dangerous and very precarious”.

He says the Palestinians in Gaza should be moved to a “beautiful area with homes and safety …. so that they can live out their lives in peace and harmony”.

“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will go a job with it too,” Trump says.

"We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings."

And it will be renamed "Trump Strip" after the dazzling casinos and condo units my crypto coin will help finance

Just total horrible nonsense. None of that is going to happen.

Four years sure feels long right now.

"Just go live somewhere else," a novel way to solve unrest in the Middle East; why didn't anyone think of that before

I have several teary conversations with friends and neighbors. One with the IG and another with USAID. These are people I know because we started families around the same time and our kids are close. We all talk about not passing this stress on to our kids but it’s fucking tough. I’ve also been solo parenting for the last two weeks while my wife travels for her international development job. It’s hitting me now that when she does this again in April I’ll be back in the office 5 days a week.

Very few Feds sign up to work for the government out of patriotism. I sure as fuck didn’t I wanted to be a rock star. But at some point something clicks and you get it. My job serves a better good for this country. You start actively trying to make it better, which is often super frustrating in such a large bureaucracy. We’ve been doing really great stuff the last 5 years and now I’m just waiting for it to fall apart makes focusing on work difficult. I don’t think most of the country understands how much damage this is doing

Word up

Sympathies, Heez.

Powerful post, Heez

I hope Bondi deports Fetterman's wife

(who knows, maybe that's why he voted for her)

Democrats are starting to say things. (Whether that’s enough, or whether they’ll go further, remains to be seen.)

― Clever Message Board User Name (Raymond Cummings), Tuesday, February 4, 2025 6:36 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

The ones on Twitter mostly seem to be doing endzone dances on Palestinian voters in Dearborn

Otm Heez

Every team meeting I’ve been in over the last week somebody has burst into tears. We’re already operating so close to the bone that even a 10% reduction in headcount in my division would be catastrophic for the services we provide. The results of losing 40 or 50% to layoffs are just unthinkable

I don’t think most of the country understands how much damage this is doing

They most assuredly don't understand the extent of the damage already done to destabilize their lives and make all of society poorer and more precarious. Their heads will continue to be filled with nonsense to help ensure that once it hits them personally they still will not understand who did this to them.

Its like an underwater earthquake in some far-off part of the ocean, and people dont realize the tsunami thats already on its way

The tsunami will hit tomorrow; the USPS is no longer accepting inbound packages from China or Hong Kong.

we used to assume that trump just wanted to be liked, and would do anything to further that aim
now it's clear he doesn't even give a shit about that anymore, he prefers being feared

Heez and One Eye Open, your posts really hit home

This Gaza thing is just mind-blowing

Yeah but it’s one of the more predictable things he’s done so far

The USPS thing is pretty nuts too. How is this squaring with Bezos when something like 70% of Amazon products come from China?

Lotta people going to be pissed tomorrow when their Shein, Temu, TikTok shop and Amazon orders don’t show up.

when you put it like that though it sounds kinda cool...

Okay, I am going to bite, as objectively as I can:

do these fucking fascists not realize that their wealth depends upon the global economic order that they seem hell-bent on destroying? do they realize that they can't just bully companies into "making things in America" because that simply...isn't the way things work? part of what has me so...uh...concerned, tbh, even as a leftist crank, is that it really just doesn't seem like any of this makes any fucking sense?

"We're a bunch of cruel fascists, let's destroy America's economy" just does not square up with...any sort of ideology that I know of.

"we're a bunch of wild-eyed anarchists, let's loot the fucking banks" is more my style, obv.

I don’t think the tariffs are designed to encourage domestic manufacturing. Tariffs like that would be more targeted and paired with incentives of some kind.

I have a feeling we will soon be seeing looting on a massive scale.

xp Also it's not like you can just flip a "domestic manufacturing" switch. It takes years to open a factory.

So what Elon will do is misdirection. The DOGE probably will uncover waste, inefficiency, even fraud. He is going to emphasize *that* to pull attention away from what he is doing, the ways he benefits. He wants to maintain the image of someone “cleaning up” a bloated and corrupt government.

I think Trump likes this plan because it will “humiliate” the “deep state.”

The sign to tap reads "Trump Is A Stupid, Declining Asshole Who Wants To Stick It To Everyone & Everything That Told Him To Eat Shit In 2020"

Exactly jaymc. Whatever is going on now isn’t about creating better trade conditions for the american worker. I wish it was something like that — not that i’d necessarily support it as i think he jerking our allies around in nasty ways — but it would be a rational thing to understand and debate. What he is doing is using tariffs to threaten other states to cave to his demands, which seem expansionist and imperial.

Many intelligent canadians i have been talking to think the 51st state stuff is serious. Even though he called off the tariffs for now it might be. Greenland, Panama, now Gaza — this is a much more expansionist vision than we saw in 2017.

He is a madman.

Xp

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the CIA has offered buyouts to its entire workforce. Because if you're gonna purge people from the government for political reasons, you definitely want to start with the spies.

So there is all kinds of fucked up things the CIA does that I don’t support. However… it can’t just be evaporated like that without causing a massive threat to global security. I would think…

I’m not sure getting American troops killed so you can put trump hotels in Gaza is gonna go over well

“Let’s destroy America before our enemies do it”