Biden was just doing his part for the DNC and the Dem leadership and their big money donors.

One of their many dirty little secrets is that they want free rein for autocracy and corruption just as much as the Republicans do, but since there isn’t a good way to frame it in a leftist narrative, they have to wait for the Republicans to pursue it, so that then they can just not quite manage to stop them. Which they do, every time.

That’s been on full display under Trump, since not managing to stop him is pretty much a full time job. But they have lots of experience with it now and are so good at it that if necessary they can even, like they did in the last budget battle, have a few members cross the aisle and vote with the Republicsns to ensure passage, and still maintain the illusion that they really wanted to stop them, but just couldn’t quite manage it.

And watch for that in this coming shutdown showdown. They will fold, guaranteed. They always do, because they never really intend to do anything else.

I really appreciate that this article repeatedly drives home the simple fact that this court is corrupt.

This isn’t simply an ideological dispute. Roberts, Alito and Thomas, most notably, are corrupt traitors who are actively and repeatedly violating their oaths of office and every ethical standard they’re sworn to uphold. They’ve gone so far in ruling contrary to law, precedent and even the Constitution that at this point they don’t even bother trying to explain, much less justify, their rulings. They just issue them.

Personally, I think they are the most egregiously destructive criminals in this administration - they, even more than Trump and his handlers and lackeys and sycophants, are responsible for the fact that the United States is accelerating into autocracy, because their job is to ensure that the federal government stays within the bounds of existing law and of the Constitution, and they have willfully refused to do that job.

Every single brazenly illegal and destructive thing the Trump regime is doing it’s doing because the supreme court has refused to honor its commitment to truth and the rule of law, and that in turn because the conservative justices are entirely corrupt and compromised.

And exactly as noted, something must be done. If those corrupt traitors are allowed to continue operating as they have, then anything anyone who wants to save this country from autocracy might do will be for naught, because those corrupt traitors will just arbitrarily rule against them and in favor of the autocrats, entirely regardless of law, precedent or the Constitution. That cannot last - it must be stopped.

I’ve long believed that Trump himself is not a fascist, mostly because his brain just doesn’t work that way. He’s an ego-driven, sociopathic petty tyrant who just wants his own way, exactly as a four-year-old throwing a tantrum in a grocery store wants his own way. It’s not so much that he’s not a fascist as that the organized thinking and ongoing attention necessary to hold to any sort of ideology is simply beyond him.

And that in turn would mean that the actual problem is that he’s surrounded by sincere fascists (and other assorted opportunists) who are whispering in his ear and directing his limited attention to whatever will serve their interests. And since he’s psychologically and intellectually stunted, it generally works.

It’s easy to see what happened here too - a woman was nice to him, so he wanted to believe her. It’s really just that simple. Like most manbabies, there’s nothing that will turn him into mush faster than a woman being nice to him.

Which probably means it’s about time for Laura Loomer to pay another visit to the White House.

Imagine being so invested in bullshit that you have to censor any and all terms that contradict it.

Really, it’s no wonder that Trump and his cronies and minions are so filled with rage - they’re in a constant state of extreme cognitive dissonance.

And it makes sense in a way that they direct their rage at “woke” people and positions. From their limited, animalistic points of view, all they understand is that when they think of “woke,” they’re filled with rage. They aren’t conscious enough to understand that the source of the rage isn’t the positions or the people, but the cognitive dissonance they experience when they cling to their opposition to simple and obvious truths.

It has to be a miserable way to live, and if they weren’t an existential threat to me, my family and friends, and society as a whole, I’d feel sorry for them.

Yeah right.

The only question is which specific excuse(s) the Democrats are going to trot out after they do the bidding of their wealthy/corporate donors and cave. Again.

There will be no deal because there can be no deal because the Israeli government is irredeemably evil and will not settle for anything less than the complete and utter destruction of Palestine and the death, displacement or subjugation of every single Palestinian.

Stop calling it a “court.”

It’s not a court - it’s a corrupt and compromised rubber-stamping service that just puts a quasi-legal gloss on whatever the hell the tyrant-in-chief wants to do.

And then she stopped by her favorite glory hole on the way home.

Just your daily reminder that the President of the United States is a deranged lunatic.

I’m entirely unsurprised that that’s on Piefed.

We actually live in a world in which a corrupt psychopath overseeing a genocide unironically tries to characterize his opposition to the concession of simple human rights to the people he’s mass-murdering as some sort of moral high ground.

Humanity doesn’t need advances in technology - it needs advances in mental health.

I really don’t think there’s a single threat facing humanity that can’t be traced back to the fact that there are so many people in positions of power and influence who are so obviously so dangerously mentally ill that they shouldn’t even be allowed among the general public.

I remember clearly when all of this came to me, in the run-up to Desert Storm, when I learned that the US had actually backed and trained Hussein. At the time, like so many, I just fell into the “they’ve been killing each other for thousands of years” trap, and started to adopt the spin that the US had just blundered, once again, by naively backing someone sho would later tirn on them.

But it just didn’t stack up. In the forst place, it was too much of a pattern - it just didn’t make sense to me that professionals would make that same blunder over and over and over again. And in the second place, looked at closely, it wasn’t so much that Hussein had turned on the US as that the US had turned on Hussein.

And then it suddenly just clicked - if the Middle East was stable, with their wealth, they could compete on a more or less equal footing with the west, instead of wasting so much time and energy and resources squabbling. So what if the Middle East’s instability wasn’t incidental, but deliberately engineered?

And suddenly everything just fell into place, all the way back to the overthrow of Mossadegh. And everything since has just slotted neatly into place, up to and including the Palestinian genocide and the western governments’ otherwise inexplicable determined support of it.

The only thing I remain unclear on is Israel’s specific role, which seems to be some odd mix of proxy snd provocateur. There’s a degree to which the west is using Israel but there’s also a degree to which Israel is using the west, and I can’t quite sort out how much of each it is.

Though it works out to the same thing either way…

The US and UK (with Israel’s eager and self-serving cooperation) have been working in the Middle East for at least 75 years now toward one and only one goal - destabilization.

They likely have some broad preferences regarding which specific crackpots, tyrants or ideologues hold power in which particular place at a given time, but that appears to be generally secondary. What they want above all else is just for things to never be allowed to stabilize there.

It’s really very simple - middle eastern oil wealth administered by stable and effective and popular governments would be an existential threat to western hegemony, so that cannot be allowed. And to that end, the west, and the US and the UK in particular, along with their psychopathically colonialist ally-of-sorts Israel, generates a constant stream of terrorism, upheaval and oppression.

Sort of.

I mean - yes - corporations do it, but for them it’s a simple business strategy. It’s not a matter of whether they want to believe it or not - it’s just that that information getting out would hurt their profits and nothing matters more than their profits.

But for right-wingers, it’s some sort of weird cognitively dissonant delusional dogma thing - like if they can successfully hide the evidence to the contrary, that’ll somehow make their beliefs actually true. They’ll be able to face the new day, confident that their beliefs are true, because after all, nobody can prove otherwise, right?

That’s so perfectly typicsl for the right.

It’s really very simple - if the evidence shows that one of their beliefs is wrong, then their principles dictate that they have no choice but to… bury the evidence.

That’s how all wealthy civilizations end.

The central problem is that hierarchical systems reward and thus select for psychopathy.

People with principles, morals, ethics, empathy and/or integrity will have choices they will not make - courses of action they will not follow, no matter the potential rewards. Psychopaths and sociopaths are not similarly constrained - they’re willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to succeed. So they will always have an advantage in hierarchical systems.

Additionally, once they gain power, they will generally arrange things such that it’s easier for them to hold power, which not coincidentally makes it easier for other psychopaths and sociopaths to gain and hold power.

Of course, with psychopaths and sociopaths in power, the civilization begins to decline. At that point, there are two broad choices - to reform the system or to warp the system to protect the privilege of the psychopaths. Naturally, the psychopaths choose the latter.

So they find themselves in a situation in which the civilization is in decline due to their actions and they’re determined to keep doing what they were already doing. So they need a diversion so that they avoid the blame for the damage they’re doing. And that’s actually fairly easy since there are a great many people who can sense thst the civilization is in decline, but who are too stupid and angry to sort out who really deserves the blame. And all the psychopaths have to do then is isolate some unpopular fringe group(s) and tell the stupid and angry peiple that it’s all their fault, then the psychopaths can stay their destructive course while the stupid and angry people fight with whichever group(s) they’ve been pointed at.

And that’s exactly where the US is today.

It’d be bad enough if this was just the Toddler-in-chief being petty, but it’s a sure bet that it’s not - that he’s very pointedly and deliberately telling his violent racist supporters to kill her.

How much money you have doesn’t determine what your values are,

Having more wealth than you could ever possibly need while people all around you can’t even afford basic necessities is very much an indication of exactly what your values are. They’re shit and so are you.

It sucks to even be in partial agreement with the broligarchs, but as a rural American, I have zero sympathy for this fuckhead or anyone else involved in the broadband fund.

The government has been pouring money into broadband expansion for decades, and for decades, internet providers have been sopping up that money while doing exactly nothing to actually earn it.