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

social security is going to hamas condoms

'Condoms For Hamas' should be a song in the new Team America musical

He's also apparently signing an executive order to bring back plastic straws.

To be fair, I support banning paper straws, and I'm as left as it gets.

the Krazy Straw industry has powerful lobbyists up there

They suck

There are better eco friendly alternatives to plastic straws. The agave fiber straws.

I think this is what they mean by not chasing every squirrel

what happened to making all the documents on the JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations public?

this is one of my all-time lol memes when i first saw it: https://ifunny.co/video/the-liberal-leaving-my-body-when-my-straw-starts-to-xP60XPbEA

Do not. Forget. Your dying. King.

Am I misremembering, or was it Musk who threw out that insane, "we'll save money by cutting off the SSNs that end in odd numbers" plan?

― Maxmillion D. Boosted (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Friday, February 7, 2025 5:54 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

That was Vivek Ramaswamy's proposal to randomly purge the Federal workforce: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/video-shows-ramaswamy-discussing-cut-federal-workforce-not-social-security-2024-11-26/.

I haven't heard that name recently; did he run afoul of Elmo?

He is running for governor of ohio apparently

So these much publicized usaid payments apparently were public information already.

The republicans are acting like elon exposed some hidden trove of payments

lolz, Trump just revoked Biden's security clearance.

I’m waiting for the executive order that says Biden lost in 2020

I haven't heard that name recently; did he run afoul of Elmo?

Charlemagne the God confronted him about this, but Vivek said no, no, they're all still pals, just wanted to try out something new.. but it seems clear he was forced out, DOGE isn't big enough for both of them

We’re about a week away from a “Biden sucks” executive order.

I thought ILX wrote it in 2021??

to be fair, I think Biden suggested that Trump no longer need post-WH intelligence briefings since he's an erratic idiot

Trump says he will fire Kennedy Center board members, appoint himself chairman

"My name is kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid......."

Kash Patel was paid by Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties, documents show

"President Trump’s nominee to be FBI director was paid $25,000 last year by a film company that had promoted anti-Western views advanced by the Kremlin, documents show."

Kash Patel was paid by Russian filmmaker with Kremlin

that sounds like the minimum ante to get in on this administration - no ties to Kremlin, no job

A former employer of mine is in the news for losing 390ish people to the USAID dogepurge.

I worked with dozens of those people (not closely, it was two weeks two years ago). These were global health experts like specialists in cholera, AIDS, typhoid and other minor inconveniences to the regime.

Interestingly they were almost all former feds who were moved over as a group to the private sector explicitly to keep doing their old jobs, but on contract. The reason was unclear, but I gather the company was hired as a way to onboard and employ these specific experts. Now one wonders if the result of that contract was that they were easier to fire.

Amy Siskind on Bluesky: “As of this afternoon, after the initial deadlines for Musk's buyout offer, just 65,000 have taken the offer, roughly 3% of employees, far lower than Musk's estimate of five to 10%. In a typical year, roughly 150,000 federal employees retire.”

NIH funding cut to the bone; med schools and universities are fucked.

Court blocked the USAID cuts though, curious to see if they simply ignore the court.

Bleak as fuck, to be sure. Though, aiui, like many other things, that requires congressional approval so it will most likely get blocked for now. Still, depressing and scary.

'Condoms For Hamas' should be a song in the new Team America musical

If you don’t want more Hamas isn’t keeping them from reproducing good?

I guess I must be dumb cause you had packages for Hamas/ Trojans and some of them used

Not to derail, but why the hell did she have used trojans in her pocket? Seems kind of icky, throw that shit out.

Hoarder probably

I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other is full of Hamas condoms

big balls was part of an international cybercrime gang: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/

The NIH cuts are devastating to research universities.

xpost i broke my tiny brain trying to read that article

i shut down emotionally right around the first mention of “Tesla.Sexy” and it was downhill from there

The Krebs story is nuts not the least because it involves him getting swatted.

Anyone who starts an LLC before the age of 18 should probably be put on a watchlist.

Good lord can you imagine the chaos if there was a 9/11 scale event

^^Biden's fault, obviously.

JD Vance sticking up for the “normalize Indian hate” guy is pretty depraved

ain't that America

Judge blocked DOGE access to the treasury, let's see what happens now

I'm currently reading Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945, which I found in my local library last week. Mayer spent a long time postwar hanging out and making friends with 10 ordinary small-town German citizens (he did not tell his new friends he was Jewish; they simply thought of him as an American), and gradually they told him about what life was really like there during Hitler's rise, and you know what? If you weren't a Jew, things were pretty good! Better than they'd been in the 1920s, that was for sure!

The reason the Trump regime is ultimately going to fail is that they're making people's lives materially worse. The OG Nazis made many people's lives better, at least until the war.

Trains won’t be running on time under this administration that’s for sure

It actually reminds me more of what happened in the Soviet Union around the time World War II started up, they were flung back on their heels because Stalin had purged so many competent people from the government, and it was being run by a bunch of amateurs or incompetents at crucial positions.

While some are just making jokes about the Kennedy Center Honors, music folks who know more are worrying about the future at Kennedy Center of the free multiple nights per week Millennium stage gigs w/ roots, global music & more; the hiphop gigs; the jazz ones; the collaborations w/ local Washington DC organizations.