1. Will Mike Johnson still be Speaker a year from now?
House Speaker Mike Johnson remains a nobody of history who has been blessed with a Republican government trifecta he can do nothing with. I’m calling it, just for fun, that the odds he’s still Speaker a year from now is 33% because:
- He’s really bad at the job, which is already impossible thanks to Trump’s cultish control of the party, and because the GOP has an extremely fractured and divided caucus made up of an historic number of conspiracists, morons, and mentally unwell people.
- He’s particularly disliked by female members who view him as openly sexist.
- Several Republicans are thinking about retiring before the midterms.
- An untimely natural death or two from geezer members during the gap between quitting members’ resignations and the special elections to replace them could stun the country by flipping majority power to Democrats in the middle of the term.
- Several more GOP members are planning on running for governor, which would require them to spend much of their time campaigning in their home states, subtracting available votes for the GOP’s already historically narrow majority.
- Trump himself could force a Speaker change via his loyalist bootlickers if the Epstein Files blow up really big, and suddenly Trump sees convenience in the House being shut down so they can’t investigate or impeach him.
That’s a good number of threats to his speakership!
I just want to acknowledge that it’s still shocking how a nobody backbencher as eminently forgettable as Mike Johnson could end up holding the gavel because of what mindlessly cynical brown-nosers the Republicans have become.
2. More states should be telling the Trump Administration to fuck off.
Along with the Trump Admin’s illegal deployment of National Guard units, and the civic terrorism perpetrated by ICE, the idea that the federal government would block states from passing any laws regulating AI companies in areas where the federal government currently has none of its own is ludicrous. Every state should be writing AI regulations right now just on principle to fight this obvious infringement upon states’ rights.
3. Should, theoretically, there be a judicial branch check and balance on executive tyranny where the Court could, in a unanimous decision, remove a lawless president?
Just a random though, but anyone reading this have any reactions to this? I’m not saying it’s possible or likely to ever be adopted, but, in an imaginary democracy, should there be a rule like that?
In a situation like we’re in now with a subservient, Do Nothing Congress allowing all kinds of executive overreach — such as like willy-nilly announcing tariffs by fiat, refusing to fund Congressionally mandated programs and agencies, bailing out Argentina, deploying National Guard units to stand around in cities’ downtowns for little benefit to anyone, arresting citizens and abducting them off the streets, sending legal immigrants to concentration camps, and even incarcerating them in foreign gulags where they’re tortured and raped — should there by a judicial check on a president who very clearly bribes or threatens legislators into subservience?
4. Was D.O.G.E. the biggest failure of the Trump Administration this year?
It was largely defeated in courts across the judicial system. It subjected normy Americans to a little platoon of fascist twinks who called themselves things like “Big Balls.” It cost more money than it saved. The cuts were needlessly draconian, and burned through a lot of Trump’s political capital and goodwill or at least the benefit of the doubt incredibly fast. It needlessly gutted popular programs that earned America extreme returns on soft power and saved tens of thousands of lives. Good Job, Elon, you dumb bitch.
5. Is measles coming back maybe a close second biggest failure?
The return of a vanquished disease is just historically stupid. It’s so absurd that MAHA people point to how few people die from diseases we actively vaccinate against as reason to not vaccinate against those diseases… Read a history book! Until roughly the 1930s almost everyone had kids die! Here’s just a brief survey of US presidents I googled for a minute and a half who had children die young:
- Of Abraham Lincoln’s four sons, three died young!
- Jefferson had 6 kids (excluding the possibly unknown number of slave children), and only two lived to adulthood!
- None of Franklin Pierce’s 3 kids lived to adulthood
- John Adams lost two kids as infants (should have lost John Quincy if you ask me… JK I know very little about the JQ Adams presidency)
- Grover Cleveland’s 12 year old daughter died of diphtheria
6. Let’s get the term “Schrödinger’s Inflation” going.
Trump’s inability to acknowledge reality has his administration acting as if inflation exists in a mysterious quantum state where it is both happening and not happening depending on the observer. He says inflation is over, but if the public complains that prices are still going up, it’s Biden’s fault.
7. Some liberal should step up and become a blue QAnon troll online.
QAnon is suspiciously absent despite all his allegations of child sex-trafficking coming true… he’s just upset that the culprits have turned out to be Donald Trump and his rich friends instead of Democrats. I thought about starting some new QAnon accounts online, but I’m too busy with The Halfway Post, so I offer this idea to anyone else for free to have fun being a reinvented QAnon relentlessly coming up with absurdly fun conspiracy theories about Trump and his Deep State of pedophile protectors!
8. I’m sick of conservatives equating liberals and enjoyers of democracy with “decadence.”
Isn’t the real decadence comes from Republicans who have no plans for the democracy at all? It’s not decadent for Democrats to campaign for big governmental evolutions and bold new programs and initatives, only for Republicans to fold their arms, scream about communism, and obstruct everything for the sake of trying to make Democrats look bad for caring about societal problems.
Isn’t the real decadence that Republicans in Congress won’t stand up for their own legislative branch power and authority following blatant power grabs from the executive branch? That Congress won’t declare real wars, they can barely pass budgets, many of them literally don’t even want to keep the government open… It’s decadence for Republicans to constantly govern like terrorists because they know Democrats will do the responsible thing and fold to avoid shooting the proverbial hostage when Republicans are doing cartwheels at the edge of annual fiscal cliffs rubber stamping whatever a wannabe dictator wants.
9. Peter Thiel and other billionaires want to leave California over a 1% wealth tax
What insane avarice! The rich have been getting tax cuts consistently since the 60s, and they’re gonna abandon the states that made it possible for them to get so rich over a 1% increase? What fucking Scrooges.
Also, why does Peter Thiel literally look like Satan?
10. The 2028 GOP Primary is a jump ball for the first time in 10 years.
Assuming Trump doesn’t run — or doesn’t survive politically or physically — the 2028 GOP primary could be spectacular:
- JD Vance: has an early lead for the white nationalist wing of the GOP, but his candidacy is complicated by being married to the daughter of Indian immigrants and having mixed kids.
- Ted Cruz: the traditional or pre-Trump Republican option, which might sound good on paper but will lose enthusiasm the moment Ted starts talking and reminds everyone how much they hate him.
- Marco Rubio: Can he live down the nickname “Little Marco,” and win over GOP primary voters who are basically single-issue on deporting everyone that looks like him?
- Ron DeSantis: somehow he’s even less likable than JD Vance.
- Marjorie Taylor Greene: MAGA conspiracist populism. But she’s kind of taking a big branding hit by Trump daily labeling her as a traitor. She’s also apologizing for her past divisive bomb-throwing and naivety regarding Trump, but Republicans have been very conditioned against apologizing or backtracking for years.
- Rand Paul: leading the libertarian wing of the party, but will conservatives appreciate ideological consistency after so many years of Trump giving everyone political whiplash being so impulsive, politically capricious and mentally unstable?
- Mike Pence: He’s got a great Christian redemption arc, but I’m not sure he can campaign without everyone at his events breaking out into chants of “Hang Mike Pence” just for fun (or muscle memory).
- Donald Trump Jr.: the nepo baby chaos candidate who might inherit Trump’s giant collection of blackmail files on every major Republican.
- Eric Trump: if Eric ran, I’d switch my political affiliation just to vote for him in the primary because then for sure Lindsey Graham’s prophetic warning about the destruction of the GOP would come true!
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