230 Comments

Ta, Marcie. Welcome to the New Gilded Age.

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It’s just going to be one endless conga line of grifting and trading of favors over the next four years.

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Someone should ask Alito about "Ad majoram DEI gloriam".

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"And for conservatives, one of our greatest frustrations is that thousands of times in the last decades, they have blocked conservative innovation."

Reporter: Mr. Ghandi, what do you think about "conservative innovation."

Ghandi: I think it would be a wonderful thing.

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There will be no qualified people running anything...just like his first term.

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Those do not always work. Often all I get are share, etc. and delete options, with NO edit.

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" Rep. Mike Waltz, to do his bidding, and he is already perky as punch at the prospect of getting rid of all nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials serving on the NSC, bragging to Breitbart: “everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20.”

North Korea attacks at 12:02.

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Russia annexes the US at 12:03.

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Conservative innovation?! Like, new designs for chastity belts?

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Lithium powered, Bluetooth 5.0 enabled dashboard Jesus figures.

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"Too Catholic." -- Hedley Lamarr

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I'm cool with nixing jobs that process the handouts to farmers, oil and gas industry honchos, and officers and enlisted men under the Pentagon. And of course all government contracting needs to stop now. Let's hear the Trash Dump voters squeal.

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They should close military bases in every state that band abortion care. Our soldiers and their families can't get health care in those places.

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Reposting a guide from last night:

Mueller She Wrote has suggestions for federal workers about to undergo fascist "loyalty tests" at the hands of these incompetent bullies and their Putin-trained Heritage Foundation handlers

Please circulate widely

https://bsky.app/profile/muellershewrote.bsky.social/post/3lfnbpak62s2u

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^^ This looks likes extremely good guidance for government workers. ^^

Thank you for posting.

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He already has over 1,400 "Schedule C" political appointments to make, most of which are not Senate confirmed. That doesn't seem to be enough. Heritage Foundation has been a major influence during in proposing appointees during Republican administrations. Their only shortcoming is that they cannot use their position to become "career" and they must leave with the outgoing administration, thus limiting their effect to a few years. That' s not nearly enough for the architects of Project 2025.

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The not becoming career is a rule not always followed. I work with 2 people who burrowed in after Obama.

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Yes, it has happened occasionally. I worked with a person who was converted through the Ramspeck Act at the request of a Senator. GAO is required to produce a report on how often it happens and whether the authority is being abused. The report I saw from the early 2000s counted 23 over the prior decade.

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‘there’s laws that limit the number of Senior Executive Service employees who can be “non-career.”’

Laws. Pfft. What part of fascism is unclear?

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Thought Crime Alert: That "incriminating" did not slip in there by accident and then hide from whichever Heritage minion was assigned to edit it. They have actual, non-disbarred, lawyers involved. Those lawyers either let it pass or (worse) approved it.

"Incriminating" means evidence of an actual crime. Wait! We have a First Amendment!, I hear you shout-thinking. Speech is so freely free in these here United States! It's protected.

Yeah, kinda sorta. But if you've ever had a boss who fired you (or tried to) not merely by twisting your words, but by inventing words you never said as "evidence" of some kind of conspiracy; a boss who succeeded in firing a colleague for "collegiality" problems; a boss who cited (anonymously) gossip from other colleagues as evidence of "controversy" and then explained that THAT was why the college wouldn't honor the contract you had with the previous boss...

Imagine Donald Trump or any of his MAGA fealtists, drunk with new power, always driven to make a big Fox splash, and not incidentally seeing remunerative value in playing Calvinball with the Constitution..."free speech" may not be the first extinction, but we must stay alert to the threats.

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"Those lawyers either let it pass or (worse) approved it."

Thank you for calling attention to this

No malignant narcissist gets anywhere without passels of enablers -- and it's one of the reasons some of us make so much noise about (White!) people who claim to be in support of democracy standing on the sidelines just ... looking the other way, instead of taking action IN SOLIDARITY when the active fascists behave as though they have lost their minds.

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Heil Twittler.

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Let the struggle sessions begin!

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I've been watching the Cold War documentary series on Netflix and I got pretty choked up watching 70k people marching through Leipzig in Oct of '89 which lead directly to the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of authoritarianism in E. Germany. Then I got thoroughly depressed when I realized that in a week, far more people are going to be in DC cheering on the incoming authoritarian regime.

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