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

now that trump has abolished the penny i gotta say: i might agree with him there. fuck a penny. especially when you read this: "It cost 3.69 cents to produce and distribute a penny last year..."

Trump must really hate Lincoln

3.69 cents saved is a penny earned

this might be the first thing I've ever actually agreed with Trump on. the penny needed to go like 20 years ago.

Yeah I had the same thought when I saw the penny headline — something Trump is doing that I don't have to get mad about.

Time to dump some pennies into the change-counting machine, pronto!

actually the most surprising thing about it is I can't immediately figure how he's grifting off this idea. perhaps transactions are gonna get automatically rounded up and sent directly to Mar-a-Lago or something

Jared shorted the company that supplies penny blanks.

It would be nice to find a corner of the internet free from fake-macho revenge-killing fantacists, but here we are.

― Iza Duffus Hardy (President Keyes), Monday, February 10, 2025 10:16 AM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yea, the problem is definitely people who have these fantasies and not those whose avarice is destroying the lives and livelihoods of people everywhere, not to mention the planet.

oh, don't worry I think both are a problem!

sadly relevant humor: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/voting-for-the-mayor-who-promised-to-blow-up-the-city-doesnt-mean-i-approve-of-the-mayor-blowing-up-the-city

we definitely don't need any new pennies, I have enough in a box in my closet to supply us for the next century, easily

old pennies will officially become nickels in 2026.

a gift from your friend DJT.

How long until the articles about how young people don't even know what pennies were?

The Pennies Mightier

Elementary school math curriculum going to take a beating

xp or the fake video on youtube where a parent shows their kids some coins and the kid has no idea what they are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9aM_dT5VMI

so Byron Donalds left DC to be on Bill Maher's show and gave his voting card to someone else to cast House votes for him.

here we go.. is this where we kickstart the constitutional crisis?

A federal judge in Rhode Island on Monday ordered the Trump administration to comply with his order to unfreeze federal grants, after attorneys general for several Democratic states claimed the directive was not being fulfilled.

In a short order, U.S. District Judge John McConnell directed the Trump administration to “immediately” end any federal funding pause until he decides whether to indefinitely block the freeze while litigation is ongoing.

yes

contempt for the lawyers and then possibly jail

Hard to know what’s even worth mentioning, but softening the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is almost comically on the nose. I would suspect Musk influences there, but probably Trump himself has found that law irksome (not to mention Jared).

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-loosen-enforcement-us-law-banning-bribery-foreign-officials-2025-02-10/

Remember when people talked about the Emoluments Clause?

remember when we all crazy for stare decisis. good times...

I think there's a decent chance that Musk/DOGE will be over by the end of February

I do think that's the area where the Overton window has shifted the most, I honestly didn't think his voters were gonna stand for him just being openly corrupt like this

The acting head of FEMA is just unliterally deciding that Congress made a whoopsie pic.twitter.com/7jAeT9uNpC

— Jeremy 'adjusted for inflation' Horpedahl 📈 (@jmhorp) February 10, 2025

Musk can just overrule Congressional laws he does not like . Awesome

Meanwhile on another item where Congress was not consulted--

Deferred Resignation for federal government workers plan deadline still on pause by Judge indefinitely until he rules on preliminary injunction request

https://abcnews.go.com/US/judge-decide-fate-trumps-federal-buyout-offer/story?id=118642464&cid=social_twitter_abcn

I think there's a decent chance that Musk/DOGE will be over by the end of February

― Andy the Grasshopper

I think there's a decent chance Musk will try to shut down every agency by the end of February

There is a non-zero chance that Elon Musk will be murdered this year.

In fact, I would say there is a non-zero chance that we will see more political assassinations in the US in 2025 than we've seen since 1968.

Many poll options here..

I genuinely don't get how he or Trump are even still alive, they don't sleep, Elon takes a shitload of stimulents and Trump eats like garbage, they're angry all the time, like is none of that stuff actually bad for you

Remember when people talked about the Emoluments Clause?

Now you get Emolumints on your pillow when you stay at Trump resorts.

It takes a lot to kill rich people. Did you see Sheldon Adelson near the end?

only when I'm laying in bed unable to move

I think there's a decent chance Musk will try to shut down every agency by the end of February

― curmudgeon,

He will try.

The corruption is the thing I've been hammering most in my utterly ineffectual and useless social media posts, because for all the legitimate and scary concerns about authoritarianism, it is all ultimately in service of world-historical cash grabs.

"Hey, I'm willing to give up my retirement if it makes the libs cry more!"

These maga guys got scammed

Elon takes a shitload of stimulants

pretty sure Trump is blotto on Adderall most of the time as well, hence the 3am tweets

The thing is though--what Musk is doing is just the stuff Republicans have been fantasizing about for decades. GOP candidates were running on shutting down the Department of Education back in 2008. People like us have been living in a world where stuff like slashing government agencies willy-nilly is unthinkable, but like half the country has been howling for it.

So Molly Jong-Fast tweeted yesterday "I don't think the richest guy in the world should be cutting funding for cancer research. Musk responded- "I'm not. WTF are you talking about?
Jong-Fast tweeted this Washington Post article "nih-cuts-billions-dollars-biomedical-funding-effective-immediately" and Musk stopped responding. 22 Blue States just filed a lawsuit against Trump's NIH for this today, by the way.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/08/nih-cuts-billions-dollars-biomedical-funding-effective-immediately/

https://bsky.app/profile/whodat35.bsky.social/post/3lhs2r5x2fs2i

Reagan was talking about killing the DoE in the ‘80s.

Hopefully the chaotic way elon is approaching that conservative project will mean he undermines and discredits it

thats the scary part, obviously it's not above Elon to just lie about the shit he's doing but judging by basically every story i've ever heard about him and everything he's tweeted out there's a good chance he just has no fucking idea what he's actually cutting and is just listening to whatever the Nazis on Twitter are telling him

He’s going too fast to really know what they are doing. Their orders are to march in there and smash as much as they can before they are definitively stopped. They want to make irreparable changes quickly.

The rhetoric is the old conservative saw of small government, low deficits, etc. But i think there is more going on here. Elon and Trump are making a play for authoritarian power.