On a vote of 63 to 28, the state House of Representatives approved Senate Bill 256, which will shutter an entire criminal court system and place it under the office of the Clerk of Civil Court in the next 6 business days.

This has been the strategy of Gulf States for some time. Any municipality with a liberal majority just… loses its ability to self-govern. Gov Abbott, next door in Texas, loves to exert state power to strip municipalities of local office functions. Also a popular move in Florida and Oklahoma.

Would be nice if National Democrats bothered to notice these abuses when they came through town on fundraising junkets, of course. But it seems like the only way out of this is to flip statewide offices or pick up and move to bluer states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further”.

Trump doesn’t have the power to just unilaterally create a new visa category.

He gets to order ICE around and they get to decide who actually gets the rough treatment.

That said, I wouldn’t count on this visa being worth much once Trump is gone. So I can understand why nobody is enthusiastic about paying his bribe.

He still can. Wouldn’t be any worse than RFK Jr.

How to do this but not get caught…

If you get into the article, it reads more like an advert for Gemini plagiarism tools than a Get Rich Quick scheme with a serious chance of working. I suspect he didn’t escape getting caught, he was brought in to do it notoriously so he could write an article about how amazing AI is at making money.

Ukraine and Russia is not a civil war by any measure

The entire conflict in the Donbas was driven by the hyped up divided between “ethnic” Ukrainians and Russians. Hell, the Maidan Revolution was explicitly a civil conflict between Russian allied Ukrainians and Ukrainian Nationalists.

The real Russian core is Moscow - St.Petersburg and the surrounding areas.

Moscow and St. Petersburg are farther apart than Estonia and Poland. These have always been distinct power centers within Russia.

So much of the discussion of this war is totally America-Brained, where you cannot see subpopulations and cultural carve-outs that aren’t made explicit by national borders. Nevermind these borders are themselves constantly in flux and contingent on the political alignments of the local ruling class.

But Ukrainians had wanted independence and even (wrongly) welcomed Nazi invaders

The Banderite nationalists, Makhnovshchina, Ukrainian Leninists, Lypyns’kyi-ists… these are all distinct historical factions often in armed conflict with one another. None of them are representative of the current EU-friendly corporate conglomeration governing the country.

Zelensky isn’t a nationalist in any meaningful sense. Neither was Poroshenko. They’ve both been happy enough to auction off Ukrainian sovereignty for foreign investment and aid.

The point is that Ukrainians see themselves as cousins of Russians but not as Russian.

There is a strain of Ukrainian nationalism that sees itself as distinct from Russians and a strain of pan-Slavic Ukrainianism that sees these groups as overlapping. And then there are non-Slavic Ukrainians that don’t fit either demographic (Jewish Ukrainians, most famously, eat a lot of shit, but so do Roma and Turks and Arabs, etc, etc).

All of these fractures are ripe for political wedging and other fuckery. And that’s exactly what international business has exploited since the collapse of the USSR. Everyone’s alienated from one another. Mass media is screaming that you’re being robbed by your “foreign” neighbors. And weapons have flooded the country to make the induced paranoia of a material threat.

Blaming the war in Ukraine on Russophobia is about as reasonable as blaming the war in Iran on their chants of ‘death to America’.

It’s a bad comparison, as Ukraine/Russia is functionally a civil war over a border that didn’t matter until the USSR dissolved. Iran/US is a proxy war over Israel’s expansion into Lebanon.

Much like with the breakup of Yugoslavia and subsequent genocidal border wars, the fight between Ukraine and Russia has been manufactured by Western political interests seeking to run both countries down. That’s why the US is sending money and weapons to both countries.

By contrast, we’re not standing up Iran’s military.

The GOP isn’t even real. It’s a trick to distract us from the evil foreigners, I tell ya.

We need good strong Republicans like Bush and Cheney back in power to protect us from the mean, bad Russians

Banning socialists

Not just socialists, “Islamists”. This guy is running for AG in a state with Muslims making up around 2% of the population. Many of them are highly educated professionals looking to form full blow communities of like-minded people.

it’s weak propaganda

Chip Roy is running for AG in Texas. It’s less “weak propaganda” and more “a policy he would like to implement if elected to statewide office.” If I was a Muslim in Texas, I’d be keenly aware of what he was proposing.

A system’s purpose is what it does.

This system appears to be functioning exactly as intended.

DC is bumper-to-bumper guys heading to think tank jobs to lobby the defunding of health and education programs. We’ve been doing this Murray Rothbard’s heyday. It’s one of the various “third-rail” issues of politics that politicians keep getting bribed into grabbing.

Yes, yes, we’re stealing from social programs to fund a fucked up war machine to support Israel and randomly attack countries for any reason, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_Syria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spartan_Shield

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

Trump spent most of his political career casually mocking the warmongering and deficit hawkery endemic to both the George and Bill administrations (in favor of his own brand of at-home white nationalist police state).

That was his whole path to victory over the GOP Primary field in '16 and again in '24. He ran - quite literally and explicitly - as a Mussolini style “national socialist”. Nakedly and unequivocally fascist in the 1930s sense of the word.

Now he’s just another John Bolton / Jim Webb neoconservative. Everything the public soured on decades ago is coming back up like swamp gas. No wonder even lay Republican voters are souring on him. He’s indistinguishable from Jeb Bush.

Under socialism, you will live next to a first generation immigrant from a country full of brown people, you will eat their food, experience their culture, and work side by side in pursuit of a better life.

And you will like it.

Breaking down rumors that Musk has a penis implant

We’re getting tantalizingly close to Repo: The Genetic Opera

Oh ho ho. You thought they were just racist against Muslims?

Well, buckle up, buckaroos.

You can just get another re-keyable lock for any added later locks or replacement lock sets.

All things that are a pain in the ass.