A bill has been introduced in Washington DC by a congressman from Georgia.
H.R.1161 – To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.
It’s real. Buddy Carter has got to be one of the dumbest suck-ups in congress. I am embarrassed to be from this country.
every parody of that lee greenwood shit from the 90s has become reality. as i’ve said before, the only thing left for this country to do is blow up the moon. it’s time.
Nice of them to memorialise those cheese-eating surrender monkeys in France this way
This is the dumbest timeline.
“Buddy Carter has got to be one of the dumbest suck-ups in congress.”
And yet, he got voted in.
(So… well done, O electorate!)
Same
Preparation H lipgloss.
I’ve mentioned fastdemocracy.com you can search for bills for your concerns, by topic, or you can follow particular bills. My topics are: Abortion, climate change, Birth Control, Contraceptives, Gender and Gender Identity, Immigration. My most direct worry is immigration, my daughters are foreign born citizens with one US parent, and my wife, their mother, has not applied for citizenship.
Such a shining example of patriotism
A kindergarten class would be embarrassed by the behaviour of the Republican Party.
Why is it taking FTB several tens of seconds to serve pages today? It wasn’t like this yesterday at this time. And it’s only when it’s an HTML resource that’s requested. Ask for a gif or jpeg and it responds at normal speed, but ask for an HTML file and it drags its heels.
Please put it back the way it was.
Ya want freedom fries with that?
@7 Charles
My most direct worry is immigration, my daughters are foreign born citizens with one US parent, and my wife, their mother, has not applied for citizenship.
Consider them lucky. They have an escape.
Freest nation. As long as your not sick, black, homosexual, an atheist, trans.
@ ^ fergl : America’s a free land, Free without a doubt, Where if you haven’t any money Then you’re free to go without.””
-Old childhood rhyme, author unknown.
And polling data currently shows the Republicans in good shape to do even better in 2026. The problem isn’t with Republicans, it’s with the voters who at the moment seem happy with this crap. Trump is only possible because of all the people who share his views.
MAGA-ism is like a virus that has infected the body politic. The only thing to be done is to wait for it to work its way through the system and hope it doesn’t do too much long term damage to the patient in the meantime. Treat the symptoms when you can, but ultimately until our immune system kicks in the aches, chills, fever, vomiting and diarhhea will continue.
@ ^ freeline : At the moment, I’m afraid its looking like brain death is occurirng as one of that virii’s main & terminal symptoms. Or has already occurrred to an awful lot of American citizens. Metaphorically speaking.
No need to be embarrassed. Such idiocy is everywhere.
“Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere” Shakespeare: Twelfth Night.
Wrong. The northern lights are yellow, with – I think- some green and purple.
.
“Cheeky Danes Offer to Take California Off Trump’s Hands”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=eeoubPqTeAs
@15 frreeline
Honestly, its not just a case of “people sharing their views”. I had a thought recently. Our grand Democratic party, and before the usual suspects show up to babble third party bullshit, their “parties” didn’t do a damn thing about it either, absolutely should have seen this shit coming. What do I mean? The Republicans have been pushing a narrative of conspiracy, idiocy, and conspiracy for years, almost all of it directed at the “deep state”, or the government in general. So, why the F was no one even trying to counter this by doing the equivalent campaign of, “Heh everyone, here is what this part of the government does, all the things it is connected to, etc., and why it matters!” Do you think for one damn second that Trump, or any of the rest of the MAGA in government right now, never mind Musk, would be even trying to get by with going after USAID, for example, if the general public knew, years ago, that they both help keep grocery prices from being even worse than they already are, and actually support freaking farmers, by paying off their costs of equipment upgrades, and the like? That, if the program ended it would actually create such a massive glut of food that half the farms in the country would have no one to sell to, and all go bankrupt trying to pay back loans they took out to buy seed and/or keep their farm equipment up to date? Would anti-vaxers have a damn single leg to stand on, never mind such a vast number of fools supporting them, if there had been clear public advocacy for them, not just, “We are going to assume everyone alive today still remembers how big a deal it was to cure polio and small pox.” Heck, even they people developing them kind of screwed up and become hugely complacent, in my opinion. Since the US absolutely never, ever, uses live version any more, because the “live vaccine” disaster with polio, and it causing partial paralysis in many people, we just “assumed” that a dead one couldn’t possibly, while being eaten by our immune system, or some other mechanism, spill out a bit of its insides and incidentally still causes damage. Yet, this actually freaking happened with the first, “dead, but still contained all its viral code”, version that came out. It never happened before, so what.. no one checked to make sure it wasn’t happening at all, and that the spillage was just never anything dangerous? But, because of this, not only has anti-vax gotten an even bigger foothold, people are blaming “all” versions of the Covid vaccine for things that where likely their loved ones having caught the actual virus, not noticed it, and are now suffering from long Covid (not because of the vaccine, but because they actually caught the damn disease). No one could see this coming, or that some nutjob might get appointed, by another nutjob, if they rode anti-government, anti-vax BS into office? And, even if you accept that they never saw that coming, it somehow didn’t occur to them to even try to counter, aggressively, the crazies?
Yeah, I know, the “left” doesn’t like running the kind of propaganda that Disney helped the military with during WWII, and for sensible reasons, but what the F good does it do to only try to convince people that are not listening, because they refuse to watch anything you actually go on to have a conversation about it, after the fact? And, what the heck good does it do to try, if you don’t even know enough to either counter the objections (both the real and insane ones), or otherwise properly advocate for the thing you are trying to defend?
Its like a twisted version of the boy who cried wolf, only in our version the “boy” is only showing up after the sheep have actually been eaten and screaming, “More wolves might be coming!” Its a bit too f-ing late!!
Literally nothing these morons are trying to rip apart are “unnecessary”, not tied in some terrifying way to other things that even Trump supporters can afford to have break, and someone couldn’t have been bloody pointing out, as soon as they knew they where coming under attack, just why the F we need, maybe “reform”, not, a billionaire version of Bizarro yelling, “Musk smash because he loves you!!!”. Because, we can’t bloody afford to lose any of them.
Kagehi, I agree with much of what you say. I think it’s important, though, to point out that rational thought starts out at a disadvantage. People prefer to believe what makes them feel warm and fuzzy rather than truths that are frequently unpleasant. Atheism will never catch on among the masses because it’s more pleasant to believe that the Lord of the Universe cares about my life than it is to believe that we’re on our own and humanity will either succeed or fail with no outside assistance.
Ditto conspiracy theories. It’s far more emotionally satisfying to believe that President Kennedy was shot by the CIA/Russians/Cubans/Mafia/Lyndon Johnson/J Edgar Hoover/take your pick than it is to believe that a 22 year old mope was able to sneak past security. It’s more emotionally satisfying to believe that the 2020 election was stolen than it is to believe that your guy lost. It’s more emotionally satisfying to believe you lost your job at the factory because of people with brown skins than because some billionaire decided to move your job overseas where he can pay peanuts. So, who needs reason when you can have rage and resentment instead?
But what the MAGA-ites don’t get (among many other things they also don’t get) is that those liberals they hate so much are responsible for improving their lives far and away from what their lives used to be. Things like a 40 hour work week, and clean drinking water, and safe food, and social security are all the result of those hated liberals, often over fierce oppositions from conservatives whose response to any attempts to make people’s lives better was to scream that it’s Marxism.
So maybe the solution is to give them, good and hard, what they voted for. Let them lose all that, and see how they like it. Yes, I know, a lot of innocent people who voted for Trump will get caught up in it, but a lot of innocent people will suffer no matter what. Maybe as they lose their benefits and what remains of their standard of living, the proper answer is to sing for them the jingle from the Toyota commercial: You asked for it, you got it.
Sorry, typo in last paragraph. Should say “a lot of innocent people who DID NOT VOTE for Trump . . .”
Ha! Mano Singham’s blog has just showed the resulting colors when you mix the colors of different flags.
Red, white and blue: Lavendel purple. ‘Old Glory’ is gay. The Japanese flag colors : pink, like cherry blossom, very apt.
Finland should be very light blue, I have no idea what that would mean. A brand of Finn vodka?
I totally agree with Kahegi: on this. Democrats have not only dropped the ball on communicating effectively with ordinary people; we’ve too often refused to pick it up in the first place! And part of the reason for this is that, since the abysmal failure of Jimmy Carter as a communicator, and the resulting crushing defeat by Reagan, so many of us have been browbeaten, traumatized and propagandized into a state of terrified defeatism and learned helplessness. Republicans never give up even when they lose big; while Democrats often give up when we’re winning!
@15. Let’s not rush to conclusions. Republicans are enjoying the honeymoon phase at the moment and have yet to pass widely unpopular or regressive legislation that’ll give them a bad rep fast. Plus it’s only been a few weeks, things don’t stay the same for long. Dems also scored positively heading to 2020 and through most of 2021. Also, you can’t ignore the fickleness of voters. Even Obama and the Dems that enjoyed huge popularity while the GOP were abysmally unpopular back in the day saw losses during his tenure, people don’t like giving one party control for too long. This and by 2026, when Trump starts to remind people of how bad he is and they feel the impact of his crap policies, I doubt the supposed approval of the party will stay static. Plus those surveys ignore the still underreported growth of resistance brewing from many parts of the nation because it’s still too early for an analysis. What Dems need to do is change their tactics and become aggressive to take full advantage when the tide turns kinda like what they did after 2004 and arguably after 2016 (this time not regressing back to just being the status quo)
On the brightside, the GOP seems to have signed their own death warrant.
Trump is a dictator ruling by decree and ignoring congressional powers and also ignoring the courts.
Which means the GOP no longer has any Federal power.
At best they are a rubber stamp.
They could just meet once a year for a week and approve the Politburo’s (Trump + Oligarchies) next 5 year plan.
The other thing that is happening, is that Trump et al. are destroying the Federal government.
He has even taken an axe to the FBI and CIA.
Which means the 50 states have a power vacuum to fill.
The Blue states can and probably will just go their own way out of necessity. When the Federal government isn’t helping them with FEMA, Department of Education, Medicaid, or other Social Safety Net funding, then…what power does the Federal government have over the states?
They are also now free to ignore the Federal courts.
“Follow our orders or no FEMA or Department of Education funding for you. Oh wait, we abolished those Federal programs two weeks ago.”
This is the corollary to a strong central government that commits suicide and becomes a weak central government.
This BTW, is what the Red states have been doing since the end of the Civil War in 1865 up until one minute ago.
Smile and nod and ignore the Federal laws as much as they want.
The USA is a big place. It is half a continent, 346 million people, and 50 independent state governments.
All governments, even dictatorships, depend to some extent on the cooperation and consent of the governed.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was willing to kill hundreds of thousands, exile millions, use poison gas on his own people, and in the end, his government folded in a few weeks.
No one thought it was worth fighting for any more.
And the Retrumplitarians are doing their best to make OUR government into something not worth fighting for.
birgerjohansson @ 22
That would be subtractive color mixing I gather. In additive color mixing, that is mixing colorful light rather than pigments, the US flag would be more a magenta I believe.
[OT]
Different proportions of each of the colours in different flags, and colours range from 2 to 6;
US flag is [Red:White:Blue Areas]::[1.02:0.88:0.41]
That’s not what was shown in that Instagram thing to which Mano linked.
Raging Bee @23:
Remember the ‘malaise’ speech (he never used that word)? It was actually well-received until the media got their grubby paws on it. A good communicator requires impartial media for their message to get across. See also Al Gore and the evisceration he got from the ‘liberal’ media.
Rob: I was fully supportive of Democrats the whole time, and I thought Carter’s speech was lame before the media started tearing it apart. Same with most of what I heard from Gore. Their communication problems weren’t all the media’s fault.
[meta]
re: “I thought Carter’s speech was lame”‘
It’s a known idiom.
(But it’s (or, it was) deprecated here)
Raging Bee@24
While you didn’t explicitly contrast him with Carter as a “communicator” I always hated the characterization of Reagan as a “great communicator.” You communicate when you convey something new and possibly even challenging to the listener. Carter attempted to do so and maybe he failed. Maybe a better communicator could have succeeded.
But Reagan never communicated a damn thing. He soothed the American ego with the most simplistic platitudes that so many wanted to hear. That’s pandering, not communication. If it’s what it takes to succeed as a president, I see very little hope. Trump, likewise, goes for what his audience wants to hear, though instead of a message to puff up our egos, he appeals to our basest instincts.
I like Carter more than ever, but maybe it is true that his approach just doesn’t work politically, at least in the US. An approach like FDR’s may have worked at one time, a kind of benevolent bullying. I am still inspired by JFK’s phrase “not because it is easy but because it is hard”. Still what American wants to hear that today?
I was around at the time, and bemused by the rah-rah-rah love for the gypper
(Oh, sorry… the gipper. https://www.smh.com.au/world/how-reagan-got-his-gipper-nickname-20040608-gdj2ut.html )
—
Just like Trump is the Apprentice’s judge: “You’re fired!”.
(All hat, no cattle)
charles @ 7:
Bills? How quaint.
Reagan was called “The Great Communicator” — as opposed to, say, “The Great Leader” or “The Great Explainer” or “The Great Visionary” — because he spoke more clearly, articulately, forcefully and convincingly than Carter ever could. Which enabled him to repackage old Republican reactionary stupidity as simple universal values and a clear call to action; while Carter just waffled and backtracked and made perfectly sensible policy ideas look like an incoherent hot mess with no clear guidance for anyone. If Carter had been a better speaker and a more resolute leader, he could have kicked Reagan’s ass and made his entire party look like the dumbass reactionary hacks they were/are.
And the worst aspect of all this is that (it seemed to me at the time anyway) a solid majority of Americans were willing to admit the Democrats were right and we needed to follow their lead to fix a whole lot of problems that we all knew needed fixing. So many Americans really were looking to Carter and the Democrats to unite and lead, and they failed miserably. And we’re still dealing with the consequences.
For the young’uns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
John @34: I was around too, and completely flummoxed by the American regard for Reagan. He came across as a smarmy third-rate used car salesman (I’m not talking about content, which was near non-existent, but presentation). Or like a B-movie supporting actor playing a President in a bad B-movie*.
I remember thinking “what is wrong with Americans?”.
*There were many good B-movies.
Nothing wrong, it’s their character.
As a Dutch person, I endorse this. Greenland is ours!
@26 raven
I hope you are right, but.. as someone pointed out, just looking at USAID, one red state took in something like 36% of all the money they had to run their own state from that agency. Trump has literally offered, as a counter to this, “Heh guys, just have the states take care of themselves, that will work!” There are two outcomes from this – a) red states wake up to the reality of how much they have depended on blue states for money to help them do anything at all, or b) somehow Trump and MAGA push the narrative that all the pain and madness this will cause is somehow “still” due to the “deep state”, and liberalism. One of those see them turning on MAGA, the other….
I desperately want to be hopeful, but…
The Red states also get most of the FEMA money. They are where the tornadoes and hurricanes always hit.
They also rely more on the Department of Education to fund their school systems.
The Blue states via the Federal government subsidize the Red states at $1.24 in direct aid for every $1.00 they pay in taxes.
There is going to a power and need vacuum as the Federal government commits suicide.
The state governments are going to have to pay for FEMA type natural disaster aid, the 10% more for education, maybe replace Medicaid, Headstart programs, medical clinic aid programs etc..
Hope hasn’t been a winning strategy lately.
I’m saying what could happen but I don’t have a whole lot of hope either.
It could take a generation or two for the US people to notice that they are poorer and powerless serfs in a dictatorship.
I’m a Boomer. I’m not going to live that long.
The Dems never reacted to the centralisation of media ownership. Now GOP-friendly corporate media own what is not outright propaganda media (Fox News, Sinclair).
Also, the Dems need to focus on the economy, to be specific, a better economy for everybody, not just minimum-wage jobs at shit companies like Amazon.
Once people have less anxiety about the economy they will be more open to things like fairness and inclusion.
…and never forget the Supreme Court.
Even though a president can appoint more than 9 judges Biden ruled out doing it at the beginning of his administration, following the Dem tradition of pre-emptive surrender.
And throw more money into job
creation! The deficit is a pseudoissue the Thugicans just pretend to care about when they are out of power.
So, how long will it take Trump and the GOP to crash the economy?
It’s contingent on how what they actually get away with so no one knows.
So far, most of what they propose is stupid and going to make things worse for us.
.1. The tariffs will increase inflation while lowering our economic growth.
.2. The proposal to lower taxes for the rich and corporations will increase our budget deficits, which are already high.
.3. Destroying all the regulatory bodies means Wall Street and the banks can divert more of our GDP to themselves and sets us up for another Great Recession type crisis.
.4. The general instability and the miserable living conditions of the US will also inhibit economic growth. Talented foreigners aren’t going to be moving here. Talented Americans are going to escape if they can.
It took George Bush 8 years to crash the economy and set off the Great Recession.
The US is large with a lot of momentum.
It could take Trump 4 to 8 years before it becomes obvious that he wrecked the economy for the 99%.
It could take a generation of dictatorship before it becomes apparent that the US is a stagnant, unstable country going nowhere.
Just my guesses based on previous events.
The GOP want to get rid of term limits. If the Dems win next time, go along with it! It will take more than two terms to repair the damage, and the demographic factor will decimate the Republicsns after that.
Latest headline from Bluesky.
No surprise.
That is going to go over well everywhere.
Medicaid is one of the main funding sources for rural hospitals and health clinics. It was expanded greatly by the Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare). Rural hospitals and clinics were closing often up until the AHCA was passed.
I knew of one rural hospital that was on the verge of closing after a planned sale fell apart in 2010. Then the ACA passed and all of the sudden, their patients could actually pay for their care instead of running up bills in the ER that they couldn’t pay.
It’s still open 15 years later.
Food stamps.
Well, a few tens of millions starving people.
Best I can say is probably some of them voted for the GOP and Trump.
Raging Bee@36
Indeed he spoke forcefully, but he did not communicate anything that the listener was not already predisposed to believe. Convincingly? I was there too, in high school and college, and I remained unconvinced, as did many Americans. He made up stories about welfare queens (indeed, loosely based on a single factual account of massive fraud https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/20/255819681/the-truth-behind-the-lies-of-the-original-welfare-queen , but only “convincing” to those who suspected it already). He made “jokes” like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_begin_bombing_in_five_minutes Haha, how funny and articulate. What a charming man!
He very, ahem, convincingly proposed building a missile shield that would protect the US from a nuclear attack. Good thing we got that working, right? Amazing that it could be done with 80s computer technology.
It is true that he singlehandedly defeated the Soviet Union by saying “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Because we silly liberals all loved the Berlin Wall and never considered in a bad thing. But… oh… wait, Chernobyl, a disastrous war in Afghanistan, a steadily eroding economy, over 40 years of containment by Democrats and Republicans, and Gorbachev’s desire for reform… do you suppose some of those contributed?
Reagan was the great con artist. Admittedly Trump has far exceeded him.
Rob Grigjanis@38
Yes, precisely. And many of us through so too. His approval ratings were not uniformly high, and it varied regionally, by race, and by education level, just like it does now.
Carter was not a bad communicator at all. You try doing it. He did make the fatal mistake of appealing to Americans’ better angels, which do not exist even metaphorically. Reagan went straight for the national ego, specifically the dominant national conceit that we are a “city on a hill” without mentioning the equally American countercurrent that James Baldwin “communicated” so eloquently:
So yeah, I get it. If you want to influence American politics, you need to speak in a language that the least self-aware Americans are capable of hearing. I think some presidents have threaded this needle, such as John F. Kennedy, e.g. puffing up egos and posing a challenge at the same time.
Uh, Langston Hughes, not James Baldwin. Sorry, I need more coffee.
Carter was not a bad communicator at all. You try doing it. He did make the fatal mistake of appealing to Americans’ better angels…
No, his “fatal mistake” was waffling, equivocating and backing down from almost every decision he made, the minute one interest-group complained of having to sacrifice something. “Better angels” need coherent leadership, and if you can’t provide that, then appealing to them won’t get anyone anywhere.
Remember “Stay the Course?” Reagan made that a VERY effective slogan — not because he was staying the right course, but merely because he was saying it when the people needed to hear it, and Carter wasn’t.
Raging Bee@52 We can agree to disagree here. I am not sure what “the people” needed to hear in 1982. If he had told them that Paul Volcker was engineering a recession at the Fed, which would be extremely painful, but at least inflation would go down, that would have been useful guidance.
I was a teenager and not paying too much attention to politics. He said nothing I needed to hear. I am pretty sure Reagan simply plastered over trouble with platitudes and happy talk. It is interesting that Biden found himself in a similar situation except without nearly as bad an economy, and yet he got the blame. It could be that he was a “bad communicator.” He was not my favorite president to say the least, nor even my favorite plagiarist. But it also just seems that these “communication” methods mainly work on an audience that was inclined to believe you in the first place.
I did get one important message from Reagan: nobody’s handing you a free lunch, so you better work and get what you want in life. Trumpies (including those my age and other who voted for Reagan) seemed to miss that message and now think their lunch would be free if the “illegals” hadn’t shown up and stole it.
BTW, I agree with your larger thesis that Democrats suck at this game, or at least haven’t been good at it since LBJ left the presidency. But nobody will convince me that Reagan was a “great” anything other than gladhanding.
@46 birgerjohansson
Yeah, no. We got here by “going along with” what the GOP wanted. It might sound like a winning strategy to use their own BS proposals against them, by cementing Democratic power, but the only real result that has is to give them even better chances to erase Democracy and the left, the second they con people into electing them again, because we will have put the tools in place to let them. And, lets be honest, they are far, far, far better at conning people than our side’s “leaders” tend to be at pulling back the curtain and showing everyone what the tricks are that are being played on them. That is what needs to be fixed. Well, that and we need to make it freaking clear enough that this is a problem, it is a disaster, and that we need adjustments made, not just in general law, but maybe even constitutionally, to clear up loop holes, and bullshit, that let them pull things like “presidential immunity”, and allowing a freaking insurrectionist to run for office, because no one could figure out whose job it was to do something about it, and the people that could have where all kissing his ass.
I am pretty sure Reagan simply plastered over trouble with platitudes and happy talk.
Yes, that’s pretty much exactly what he did, but with a little bit of “pretend call-to-action to ‘solve’ problems we’re now blaming on ‘government'” (as in, “government is the problem, therefore let’s all join together and bravely cut our taxes, deregulate business, and shaft the poor to bring government under control! I know this is going to be hard (for people we don’t care about), but we have to Stay the Course!”) And he did all that with the confident, mature-sounding, fatherly-leadership voice that people, at some level, wanted/needed to hear. And it worked because his opponent always sounded halting, hesitant, unsure, and downright lost, so even when he was right, he sounded wrong. Seriously, Reagan always managed to sound more convincing, even when it was obvious he was dead wrong and Carter was right!
It is interesting that Biden found himself in a similar situation except without nearly as bad an economy, and yet he got the blame. It could be that he was a “bad communicator.”
Yes, he was, on ALL issues, even the ones that should have been “winning issues” for Democrats. He simply sat back and allowed Republicans — and especially Trump — to dominate and control the public conversation, literally every fucking day, with absolutely ZERO notable effort to counter or push back on any of it. And the net effect was to let Trump continue to lead on every issue, so it was almost like he’d never left the Presidency and was still calling the shots and shaping everyone’s reality.