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Thursday GNR: Weapons of Mass Distraction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-03
All Republicans have to do is cook up some bullshit culture war issue to distract the morons who vote without thinking!
Gnusie Slideman
This has been their strategy for many years, but it is apparently no longer the case.
They have been having a lot of trouble thinking of any new bogus moral panics since the trans athletics and bathroom nonsense, DEI, and sweeping up essential immigrant workers, all of which are now energizing us more than them.
The panics they have attempted recently have fallen completely flat. Google searches on several variations of the topic turn up nothing new from them.
Immigrants are not eating pet dogs and cats.
Do you even remember the fuss about Sally Mann’s photos?
Crime is worse in Red states than Blue, and among the native-born than immigrants.
Nobody complains about the prices of eggs and gasoline any more.
Drag queens? You mean like Giuliani?
Trying to kill Medicaid will hurt MAGAs particularly hard.
Even Democrats favor deporting violent criminals, but that is not whom CBP, HSI, and ICE are illegally going after.
Banned book clubs are flourishing. I just finished Looking for Alaska, and have some others on request at our local library. I am well back in the queue for some of them.
Rabidly Repellent Republicans Rushing to Ruin
At 870 pages, the Big Bad Ugly Bill has been described as the world’s longest suicide note. I’m sorry that I don’t remember who I heard saying that. It is widely agreed that it will give Democrats a wide range of points of attack in the 2026 midterms.
Here is one I caught to write down for you. The House bill reclassified “minor children” from below age 18 to below age 9. The Senate put it back up some, to 14. This is
Trickle-down cruelty.
Quoted by Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-CT, in a Congressional Black Caucus news conference, attributed to an unidentified colleague.
I was watching last night as the vote on the rule for the bill stalled in the House. Republicans could only afford three No votes on their side, and were holding the vote open for hours with 4 or 5 Noes and 8 or 9 Not Voting while House and White House leadership tried to twist enough arms to get this through.
Then, suddenly, at 3:30 am, all of the holdouts caved and voted for the rule.
Then there was an hour of debate, repeating all of the arguments previously offered. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries then got to speak at length, in part reading from numerous letters from people all over the country whose family members or themselves are endangered by threatened cuts.
As this post is published, Jeffries is still at it, and just starting in on our broken immigration system.
I make no predictions about when the final vote will occur, or how it will turn out. We will know soon enough. Then we can all turn out for the July 4 weekend protests.
The stock and bond markets unaccountably have not responded to this economic meshugas, but the dollar is down more than 10% in recent trading.
It isn’t possible to cover all of the deliberate cruelty in the Big Bad Ugly Bill in a post. Name a group other than entitled MAGAs, billionaires, and broligarchs, and you will find much in this bill targeting that group. We saw it in the Senate vote-a-rama on Monday night and Tuesday morning, and we will have to take months to figure out the scope of the disaster even if it gets to the planned final vote in the House.
The bill only got through the Senate because Sen. Murkowski of Alaska accepted a vile bribe, special carveouts for Alaska in The Great Big Ugly Bill. But she voted for all the rest of the bill to screw over Alaskans, all the rest of the country, and much of the rest of the world.
CNN: Carveouts for Alaska and tax breaks for whalers: How Lisa Murkowski got to yes on Trump’s agenda bill
Murkowski has long telegraphed her concerns with the bill. In a town hall last month in Cordova – a port town accessible only by plane or ferry – she praised some elements of the bill but warned against federal funding cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps. Shortly before the final vote, Senate leaders were still trying to secure more funding for Alaska’s rural hospitals – after already doubling a fund they’d added for rural hospitals, from $25 billion to $50 billion, to be disbursed over five years. Staffers were still writing in the margins of the bill, trying to find a way to make the rural hospital fund more appealing to Murkowski, two sources familiar with the matter said. In addition to the fight on Medicaid, Murkowski won a huge victory on a provision that delays the requirement that states with high payment error rates start contributing to the cost of food stamp benefits. The original measure would make states with error rates of 6% or higher pick up between 5% and 15% of the tab. But the states with the largest error rates would get another year or two to implement the provision, said Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Currently, 10 states, including Alaska, have error rates that would qualify for the delay.
The best that can be said for the bill and the process is that Republicans are systematically shooting themselves—politicians and MAGA supporters both—in all of their feet at once, and therefore we can look forward to taking back the House. The Senate is harder to predict, but we definitely have chances there, too.
x Feministly arguing that people assigned male at birth are innately better at strategy games than those assigned female at birth. Sensational women’s rights movement you’ve got there.
[image or embed] — Arthur Webber 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 (@bernietranders.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 6:26 AM
unCivil War Tales
MAGA Civil War Explodes Over Trump Support for Israel
'It's blowing up': The Iran conflict is sparking a MAGA civil war
As Trump weighs next steps on Iran, there's a big debate among MAGA figures like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and MTG over potential military action.
'MAGA civil war': See Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson brawl over Iran
Musk vs. MAGA: Civil War in Trumpworld
Bannon Turbocharges MAGA Civil War With Demand to Investigate Fox News
Regular Good News
No Gloom & Doom here. When we all tell you what’s wrong with our politics, it’s because all of us can do something about it. We just have to show up at the protests, online, in our neighborhoods, and at election time. We can also vote with our dollars against the megacorps and broligarchs.
Science! Lifeforms! Weirdness!
x In the background is the JWST image showing all the galaxies that form this cluster. The Bullet Cluster is actually the aftermath of a collision between clusters, and there’s so many galaxies here 🤯. The pink data is from the Chandra X-Ray telescope (2/n) — Skylar Grayson (@skylargrayson.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 4:45 PM
x NASA Webb ‘Pierces’ Bullet Cluster, Refines Its Mass JWST recently zeroed in on the Bullet Cluster - delivering highly detailed images that show a greater abundance of extremely faint and distant galaxies than ever before. 🧪 #Cosmology science.nasa.gov/missions/web...
[image or embed] — Daniel Pomarède (@pomarede.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 3:18 PM
x Something lost a bit in the amazing images released earlier: Vera Rubin Observatory is a steely-eyed asteroid hunter! It's already found thousands of new ones in just a few nights, and is predicted to find *3.7 MILLION* more. THREE POINT SEVEN MILLION badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/vera-rubin... 🔭🧪
[image or embed] — Phil Plait (@philplait.bsky.social) June 26, 2025 at 9:46 AM
x ⚫️ Rubin provided convincing evidence of the existence of dark matter – we call it "dark" because it does not emit light, and we still don’t know what it’s made of. 🔭🧪
[image or embed] — NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory (@vrubinobs.bsky.social) June 27, 2025 at 5:51 PM
x JWST captures its most extreme gravitational lens ever Hubble previously viewed galaxy cluster Abell S1063, finding swirling, distorted lensed galaxies. With a JWST deep field of that same region, you won't believe what we saw.
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #astronomy #jwst #hubble
[image or embed] — Ethan Siegel (@startswithabang.bsky.social) June 23, 2025 at 10:26 AM
x Wow! Scientists engineered E. coli to convert plastic waste (PET) into pain medicine paracetamol (acetaminophen or Tylenol) in under 24 hours with up to 92% yield.
www.nature.com/articles/d41... #medsky #pharmsky 🧪
[image or embed] — Ruth Ann Crystal (@drruth.bsky.social) June 29, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Funny or Fuggedaboudit
x I can only quote @billredekop.bsky.social on this one. "Another bingo! for @deadder.bsky.social". The #cartoon refers of course to the grand speech of #KingCharles in #Canada 's parliament. The #art of #editorial #political cartoons.
[image or embed] — Ton van Heemst (@bloemendaal.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 10:35 AM
Funny Music
Johnny Cash - Boa Constrictor
You can't rollerskate in a buffaloherd - roger miller
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