I don’t know if the tariffs were designed to do that, but I’m sure the plan has been to privatize the USPS and many of the functions of the agencies that have been gutted–the goal is to either eliminate or privatize as much of government services as can be done.

Maybe the ones who died young would have turned worse and worse over time if they’d had a chance?

What would be radical is if someone with some power stands up to trump instead of capitulating. Looks like Pritzer may actually do something (as opposed to Newsom’s campaign performances). Fingers crossed.

There’s something so Uncanny Valley about that face.

Obvious Russian agitprop, you can immediately tell by how they put Ukraine as dog poop and by all the replies to it from Russians laughing specifically at that part, but the other stuff is obvious as well.

fucking fat bags of filthy fascist shit 😡

This is all part of was planned to be done all along, regardless of the Epstein files.

This is a very good way to explain it. We need both kinds, both are important.

I hate reading the comments of all the capitulators here, carrying water for the regime by trying to discourage people with this constant drumbeat that protests are useless and ineffective. Bullshit. Are you magats? We’ve seen examples in history where protests and the movements they enabled have brought down those in power.

Protests are necessary but not sufficient in themselves. They’re how resistance starts and builds, not how it ends. Did you ever think it might take time to form the momentum to get to a critical mass, especially after decades of complacency? Real momentum and effective action was never going to happen immediately or in just weeks, or even in less than eight months which is where we are now. There are already people grouping and doing things other than protests (iykyk) and will be more, made possible by the support and cover that large numbers participating provide.

Troops are being moved into cities and they will keep being sent to more cities. Blue cities. There’s one reason for that–they want to intimidate people from turning out and use force to stop those who do. trump keeps saying so and plans are being implemented.

Point is, you may think it’s all useless and ineffective, but the regime obviously doesn’t. Why do you want to help them? If you think it’s hopeless, fine–stay home and doom scroll, but stop trying to dissuade others.

… it’s faith and belief that make it work

But it’s also the Achilles heel of the whole system … if enough people in the whole system stop believing in it … it all collapses in on itself and it is destroyed and evaporates instantly.

Just like the US Constitution.

Here, the only office not directly elected by popular vote is the US Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, where it is determined by the infamous Electoral College, where each state has a different number of votes to cast, one for each senator and representative seat they have. Most states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state, but a couple of them (Maine and Nebraska) do it differently, so sometimes the other candidate winds up getting one of their electoral votes.

All other elected offices are determined by popular vote for the seat being elected. So,

For a US Senate seat (where each Senator represents the entire state), every voter in the state votes in that race and the winner is determined by popular vote [1].

For the US House of Representatives, each state is divided into a number of districts, with the number based on the population of that state relative to the US population as a whole. So a state with a large population gets many districts and a state with a lower population gets only a few (in some cases, only one!). The voters in each district elect their representative for their own district and the winner is determined by the popular vote in that district.

[1] Before 1913, people didn’t directly elect their Senators, the state legislatures did! So we’ve at least made progress there.

The USA is a union of 50 semi-independent states, not a single homogenous country, which is where most of the complexity comes from.

But, doesn’t your country (you didn’t say which it is) have any districts (or geographic subdivisions of some kind) where the inhabitants living within it send a representative to the national level to advocate for their interests and vote on national legislation with their local interests considered? That’s what we’re talking about here, except with an extra layer in between, where each State (being a semi-independent entity) gets to decide how it draws the boundaries of the districts within it.

Good to hear!

Thanks for the info that it’s totally legal, I didn’t realize that. So I guess the cases I’ve heard about where district boundaries were found illegal by a court must have been based solely on the racial discrimination aspect for violating a civil rights law or something (maybe the voting rights law that SCOTUS has been gutting step by step?)

I know there has always been plenty of gerrymandering, but there always seemed to be a limit to how far they went with it, so I stupidly thought there was some actual law limiting it in some way.

If a candidate wins a majority of the population as a whole, it is not logical to assume they won a majority of all demographics in that population.

More specifically, in the previous 2 times he ran before the 2024 election, we knew that the majority of women voters voted against him. And that he won one of those elections in spite of not getting a majority of women. So the logical thing to assume would be that he didn’t get the majority of women in 2024 either, in spite of the fact that he won that election. Which is what happened.

I think you missed my point. Their being a lost cause doesn’t mean we don’t have to care about what they do. Their illegal gerrymandering affects all of us by cementing a republican majority in the US Congress.

But they used to have to draw their districts in a way that wouldn’t get thrown out by the courts. Now they can do whatever they want. There are still a few judges left that will rule against them, but not for long as more and more are replaced by MAGAts. In the meantime, they can still go ahead and do it now because by the time the issue works its way through the legal system the 2026 midterms will have happened and they’ll have cemented control.

Oh? Then why are repubs gerrymandering so hard? Because they’ll pick up 5 seats in Texas by doing it. And they’re going to do the same in all the red states they can and pick up an extra one here and an extra one there and get a nice, cushy permanent House majority by blatantly violating district-drawing “norms” to a mind-boggling degree like this. Because now they can.

But don’t worry about Dems fighting back by doing a damn thing, let alone gerrymandering harder.

Nope, that would only help with state-wide and national elections, not for district-level ones. If they’re gerrymandered to be a majority republican district, the winner will be a republican even if there is ranked choice and popular vote. Or vice-versa if gerrymandered to be a Dem-majority district.

Not logical at all.