They won’t be able to complain because you’ve turned off all the phones and shut down most of the SSA branches.

Her farm had been awarded a grant worth $400,000 through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help pay for the costs associated with hiring seasonal workers from overseas through the H-2A visa program, which farmers have used for years to hire temporary agricultural workers.

The USDA describes the program on its website as a way to address labor shortages on American farms and reduce illegal immigration. It’s backed by $65 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan, a Covid stimulus bill passed in 2021.

IOW she was only getting that $400K because of a program funded under Biden. Which of course is why trump is freezing it, along with programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, also passed under Biden. He wants to undo everything Biden did.

Carlson has been trying to get an answer from the USDA about the status of her grant, but her grant manager told her that they were “awaiting guidance from leadership.” When she followed up more recently, she received an out-of-office email.

Because they got fired!

The damage included “deep scratches and punctured tires.”

That’s it? Y’all Canadians are so polite.

Teslas are not real cars

I think this Trumpian coup cannot be stopped by legal means now that Trump views himself as above all law and thinks his executive orders amount to regal degrees from an absolute monarch.

I agree, I think it’s a matter of a very short time before we all understand that the judicial branch is powerless against him, or I should say him combined with the Repub party which collaborates with him.

Either he’ll be stopped by political power of the opposition (if an effective one can be exercised), or violence like a civil war or coup, or else he won’t be stopped at all. Judging by how similar things are and have been happening in other countries, this feels like some kind of widespread shift away from a relatively short-lived period of democracy and back to the more usual systems of autocratic/oligarchic rule. But hey, it ain’t over yet so we should at least try to save what we’ve got.

I’m old too, so I don’t know how much help I can give to the younger people who will be the ones living long-term in whatever comes next. Good luck on your side of pond.

Who said reform it? Take it over! Or to use your analogy, they’ve built a powerful machine over many years with tons of resources and capabilities–THAT’s what we take away from them, we uninstall them and install a new OS / new leadership on. Starting a new party is like having the software but you’re starting from scratch building hardware to run it on.

Left taking over the D party is no more reanimating the old America than the right taking over the R party was. D party a dying machine but a machine that’s already built and running, ready to be handed over to new operators to replace the defective parts and make it do what the people demand and need.

The most important thing now is to first stop the fascists from gaining total control, which means the opposition has to gain more political power quickly, whether that’s by fighting from the outside with a new party (IMO a less tenable strategy) or by fighting from both inside and outside to kick out the old guard and replace them, taking over the party apparatus (like the right did to the R party starting with the TEA Party movement).

I know and agree with your points, but the time wasn’t ripe then. There are always people ahead of the curve and AOC is one. When she got there the Dem machine was still too powerful and too early to change it but now things have changed. People are now demanding that the old guard Dems either stand up and fight or get out and make room. AOC will be a leader in that.

The last election was a mortal wound to the old Dem party–not dead yet but dying and its infrastructure is there and ready to be taken over and appropriated for a new purpose.

Remember the TEA party is how the right started their movement. It took several election cycles but eventually every old guard Repub either joined them or got kicked out. They won because they had a significant movement of regular people behind them and then a charasmatic leader appeared and took the lead. That needs to happen on the left.

Rather than try to start a new party, it’s easier and more efficient for the left and progressives to take control of the Democratic party and make it their own (can rename it later). Just like the right took over the Repub party.

The time is ripe for it – yes, a bit too ripe, maybe even too late, but unfortunately that’s how it works with humans–it takes things to get to extremely dire circumstances where all could be lost for the general population to be jolted out of complacency and finally take action.

BUT the other thing we need is someone with charisma and a certain personality type to emerge and lead, because most humans need to be led like sheep.

Seize all his assets and put them into funds for universal health care, social security, WIC, etc. Then not to be cruel, provide him with food and shelter like you would any living creature; however to get to the food each day, he has to walk down a street that is lined with people who can jeer, boo, spit and laugh at him (but fenced off so not allowed to do any violence), and daily footage is streamed online for viewing by those unable to attend.

I was here but barely too young to vote at the time (not that it mattered since he had so many people enthralled like trump has done). No, I will never forget how he (along with some others like Newt Gingrich) ruined everything, so just as I was getting started in adult life, things were already starting to go to hell and it hasn’t stopped since.

Reagan really was the beginning of the end for this country, and though a couple times it looked like we might, we were never able to turn things around. And now here we are, experiencing the culmination of his work of turning America into a kleptocratic oligarchy.

Defnitely!

trump is going ahead and doing whatever he wants anyway, regardless of laws or court orders, with the full support of the R party which is in the majority in both Houses anyway.

Only one House Dem voted yes on it (Jared Golden of Maine). So it passed 217-213 because R’s have the majority and one of them defected as well. So House Dems are holding together pretty well, but as long as the R’s also hold together there’s nothing they can do to stop them.

Only the Senate D’s could have stopped the bill, by voting against cloture (even though Dems are in the minority, cloture requires 60 votes). But not only Schumer but 9 other quislings (8 D’s and 1 I) voted with the fascists. List of them here. But Schumer is Leader so if he had taken a stand against it, probably some of those other 9 would have followed his lead and it could have been stopped.

It’s still good for the House Dems to be doing this, though, calling attention to the problem so more people will call their Dem senators demanding that they take action as well.

I’ll check and see if I can do that with this one!

I should have thought of that. Thanks! Ironically, I have a very old lead-acid UPS in the basement that I’ve been kind of afraid to plug in again after all this time.

Why removing the battery? I was thinking that could be one good thing about using a laptop is that in a way it has its own UPS.

Good question. I’ve been drinking Earl Grey for so long I don’t remember which came first, that or STTNG. It’s possible I first tried it because of the show.

My car armrest has physical buttons (edit: I guess you’d call them “rocker switches”) that I can push forward or backward to raise/lower the windows. It would be absolutely ridiculous to make me navigate a menu on a touchscreen to do that–please tell me newer cars aren’t doing that?