Senator Lisa from Alaska, was the weak link today. Who from the MAGA Republican regime will be the weak link tomorrow or when the bill goes back to Congress for a final approval?
Sen. Murkowsky’s vote was without concern mercy. The maga wanna be king is guilty, the senators, representatives, many judges, greedy people, people who fail to do the basic act of voting are part of the weak link.
Wake up, people. The fact of the matter is -- by majority vote -- the "moral compass" of the U.S. is now officially moral imbecility, with absolute prosecutorial immunity not just for the president but for the entire plutocracy, owners and functionaries alike, all shielded by Christonazism, the zero-tolerance theocratic sadism of Christian white male-supremacist hatemongers. And because it is a majority vote to abolish every humanitarian gain our species has ever achieved, this nation, like Germany's Third Reich, has thus defined itself for all eternity. But this time there is no alliance on this planet with the capability of overcoming its "Better-Dead-Than-Red" policy of destroying the world rather than face surrender; thus its hateful atrocities will continue until our species is extinct.
Thus too the objections by the "Democratic" (sic) Party are utterly meaningless. Do not forget it was as much the Democrats' treachery as the Republicans' agitation of the nation's ever-simmering, always-definitive hatreds into a New-Holocaust that killed the (obviously futile) effort to shape a democratic republic from a majority rabble of maliciously ecogenocidal, pridefully hateful religious fanatics, misogynists and racists.
That said, the infinitely courageous Heather Cox Richardson overlooks one point and is wrong on another. She misses the purpose of the unprecedented increase in national debt: it is to rationalize, per Grover Norquist, the permanent end of (all) safety-net services, Social Security and Medicare included. And she is wrong about a national throwback to the Great Depression. It is a throwback, yes indeed, not to the U.S. under Hoover but rather to Russia under Nicholas II. Only this time the population is already too subjugated by moral imbecility -- by selfishness, cowardice and self-imposed ignorance -- to ever overthrow its oppressors.. Which does (not) end our obligation as true humans to yet dare honor the remnants of humanity by the most defiant resistance we can muster.
''The Crime of Austerity: When Power Serves the Few''
What kind of person votes for legislation that knowingly harms or kills fellow citizens? Someone who has abandoned any moral compass in favor of wealth, ideology, or power. The proposed Republican-backed bill, as described by Senators Chris Murphy, Angus King, and Sheldon Whitehouse, is not merely flawed policy. It is a calculated assault on the vulnerable.
Cutting healthcare for 16 million people, slashing food aid for children, and handing massive tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy is not governance, it is cruelty cloaked in bureaucracy. The numbers are stark, but the human cost is starker. Rural hospitals will be shuttered. Children will go hungry. Preventable diseases will go untreated. Lives will be lost.
This legislation is not the result of oversight. It is not the product of economic necessity. It is a conscious, strategic decision to sacrifice the many for the benefit of the few. The architects of this bill claim to defend liberty, but liberty without healthcare, without food, without shelter is not liberty at all. It is a fiction used to mask greed. Their vision would return us to a pre–New Deal America, where economic suffering was a private burden, not a public concern, and where government existed only to protect the interests of those with wealth.
Americans can no longer afford governance by cruelty. We cannot tolerate a system that treats lives as bargaining chips in a game of political poker. Every vote for austerity is a vote against the people. Every bill that sacrifices the vulnerable is a stain on our national conscience.
Exactly. The difference between animals and humans is supposed to be that we care for each other, not just our own, but strangers too. Animals may protect their young or act socially, but they do not have our moral agency. They do not build systems of justice or reflect on right and wrong. We do. That moral responsibility means we should protect the vulnerable, care for the sick, and ensure no one is left behind. When we fail to do that, we are not just neglecting policy, we are neglecting our humanity.
It's worth bearing in mind that there have been no recorded cases of animal genocide.
If the evolutionary basis of altruism really rests only on kin selection i.e. that it is an adaptive trait, that doesn't really say much that's good about us. Frans de Waal has argued persuasively for the existence of empathy in animals.
Ain’t that the TRUTH. Christianity has had a lot of creeps over the years spewing BS they ‘found’ in the Bible … while in real life they were sexual abusers, monetary misers w huge hidden resources… messed up Christ’s message for so many people..
For an eye-opening glimpse of the true Christianity, read Robert Graves' "King Jesus," which is based on the tabooed "Gospel of the Egyptians." It quotes Jesus as proclaiming, "I am come to destroy the works of the female" and explaining that the only triumph over death is the elimination of life. Hence Christianity's two millennia of genocidal crusades, witch-burnings and sundry other torture-fests -- including the one now upon us thanks to the voters -- all its horrors rationalized as "god's will."
Our biggest problem today is too many Americans so intellectually strait-jacketed by the Cult of Mandatory Positivism, they will go to their graves refusing to acknowledge that we are beset by genuinely bottomless Evil.
Like Sheldon Whitehouse, I, too, feel disgust for the Senate right now. I am grateful to Heather Cox Richardson for her podcast, especially the commentary from the floor speeches of those opposing the big ugly bill.
Use/share this spreadsheet as a resource to call/email/write members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Reach out to those in your own state, as well as those in others. Use your voice and make some “good trouble” ❤️🩹🤍💙
"Are we locusts or are we honeybees?" asked Van Jones. Turns out, most Senate Republicans and JD Vance and, of course, President Trump are locusts. As engaged citizens, we can still be honeybees. Income inequality has only gotten worse since 13 years ago when Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? debuted. Trump's "big beautiful bill," which the Senate passed with VP JD Vance breaking the tie, will contribute to class warfare genocide via cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps) and Medicare. This "big bad bill" ramps up decades of class warfare in multiple, traumatic ways. Call House Republicans today and every day to demand that they not support this "big bad bill!" Ask them: How does the Republican Congressperson plan to use their Federal Employee Health Benefit plan in their home state when hospitals, outpatient care practices and clinics and nursing homes in their home state close as a result of these cuts? Had they thought about that? https://youtu.be/Tqs_oSS-Q38?si=mqdG0clLjEW5i4t2
Great advice. Agreeing on facebook is preaching to the choir (although I do it all the time). Call, write, email, protest to your members of congress and other outlets.
We commit evil against all of humanity when we knowingly let our children die. That includes all children. African, Arab, Asian, Indigenous, American, White, Black, Yellow, Brown babies are all included in the scrolls of human lives.
As the wealthiest nation ever to exist on the planet, we also have responsibilities to repay the world for the tremendous good fortune we have been gifted. Contrary to misinformation, we did not become the wealthiest nation in history because other countries were "taking advantage" of us.
But instead of sharing our good fortune, we have implemented a cruel government led by a criminal felon who is a fraud who obliterates the truth. He insists that we tax the world with tariffs that our citizens pay, while he and his donors (aka those who pay him bribes and give him airplanes) are given tax breaks.
And the reason to cause all of this death, pain, moral disruption, and disgust is.... ?????????????????????????????????????????? Seriously, as Americans, we must ask ourselves one basic question at this stage of our country: "Who Are We?"
I don't want to give in to despair, and I believe we can overcome this moment as we have in other precarious moments of our history. This will be an unrelenting fight, though, and I'm inspired by the "No Kings" protests and MLK's belief in "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
"The ark of the moral universe" is indeed long, but the notion "it bends toward justice" is irrefutably disproven by any accurate reading of patriarchal history, which began only six or seven thousand years ago. Indeed that history proves it is our species most politically paralytic Big Lie, for the arc's true bend is toward ever more zero-tolerance tyranny enforced by ever-greater technological omnipotence. Or as Loreena McKennitt so eloquently puts it in "Caravanserai," "...the months of peace and all the years of war..."
It reminds me a bit of Ray Kurzweil’s term “the law of accelerating returns” (about how technology seems to advance on an exponential rate). Perhaps we can see that, as you say, this applies to all human behavior as history records in such tragic detail. There is a persistent self-serving attitude of those who promote evil in all its many forms we see rampaging around the world. Their evil is accelerating at an exponential rate. We are all in great danger from this worldwide cabal of criminals who have infiltrated our government via their stooges such as Humpty and Musty.
The Senate has of July 1, @ 1:28 EDST passed Trump's Big Beautiful Bill as I have read. The transaction provided Lisa Murkowski and goodies for her states citizens, the juice she needed to, I assume, continue to serve her citizen's interests. It is all transactional. And, the result is the destruction of all that good, right, and responsible for our civic lifes.
Let's start with the pollution caused by of oil from combustion in the engines of modern life. The Koch brothers (now one brother) and his political organization threaten the world much as Nuclear Weapons now are the key to global power, domination and fear. The problem is, our global economy runs on oil. That is, perhaps, the reason that Donald Trump wants to return to the 19th century. But that won't happen. The 21st is in process, and Global Warming continues unabated: the 'bomb' and its power continue to heat atmosphere. More energy, more heat and destructive energy to wreak havoc around the world.
The real Armageddon the fossil fuel industry is bringing us is the near-term prospect of an uncontrolled rapid heating of the planet, without mitigation by warm oceans that have absorbed as much heat and carbon gases as possible. The nearing catastrophe is being hastened by Trump’s attempts to destroy the renewable energy industry. They know that they are doing this, however they don’t care about the consequences. We are the only ones left who can support renewable rooftop solar, vehicles, etc. by buying such products; preferably not from the guy who sabotaged our government!
While that idiot Trump is talking up coal and ending subsidies for solar and wind, China is building the world's largest solar array in the Kubuqi desert.
The fact that we still cannot quit coal is largely due to developing economies, especially China, Indonesia and India, where it is cheap and abundant. In the US, which has abundant gas reserves, it's the most expensive form of energy. When the wind blows or the sun shines, wind and solar are easily the least expensive. However, coal use continues to climb. It hit a record high last year, with the IEA now forecasting consumption to increase slightly. Instead of a transition to renewables what we're seeing is an increase in all forms of energy to meet growing demands. Trump goes in the other direction, in favour of fossil fuels, because the fossil fuel industry gives him money. And now there's the insatiable demand for energy for data centres.
I asked Senator Daines if he planned to send sympathy cards to our rural nursing homes when they are forced to close. Also told him he is beneath contempt.
"Are we locusts or are we honeybees?" asked Van Jones. Turns out, most Senate Republicans and JD Vance and, of course, President Trump are locusts. As engaged citizens, we can still be honeybees. Income inequality has only gotten worse since 13 years ago when Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? debuted. Trump's "big beautiful bill," which the Senate passed with VP JD Vance breaking the tie, will contribute to class warfare genocide via cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps) and Medicare. This "big bad bill" ramps up decades of class warfare in multiple, traumatic ways. Call House Republicans today and every day to demand that they not support this "big bad bill!" Ask them: How does the Republican Congressperson plan to use their Federal Employee Health Benefit plan in their home state when hospitals, outpatient care practices and clinics and nursing homes in their home state close as a result of these cuts? Had they thought about that? https://youtu.be/Tqs_oSS-Q38?si=mqdG0clLjEW5i4t2
This is horrifying and barbaric. The bill is nothing but murder for innocent Americans. There is no justification for greed and money over a human life.
Those that defend and support a convicted felon criminal have no “moral compass”!
So fed up with weak gutless politicians that will use any excuse to hurt everyday Americans for the greedy few!
Senator Lisa from Alaska, was the weak link today. Who from the MAGA Republican regime will be the weak link tomorrow or when the bill goes back to Congress for a final approval?
Sen. Murkowsky’s vote was without concern mercy. The maga wanna be king is guilty, the senators, representatives, many judges, greedy people, people who fail to do the basic act of voting are part of the weak link.
Wake up, people. The fact of the matter is -- by majority vote -- the "moral compass" of the U.S. is now officially moral imbecility, with absolute prosecutorial immunity not just for the president but for the entire plutocracy, owners and functionaries alike, all shielded by Christonazism, the zero-tolerance theocratic sadism of Christian white male-supremacist hatemongers. And because it is a majority vote to abolish every humanitarian gain our species has ever achieved, this nation, like Germany's Third Reich, has thus defined itself for all eternity. But this time there is no alliance on this planet with the capability of overcoming its "Better-Dead-Than-Red" policy of destroying the world rather than face surrender; thus its hateful atrocities will continue until our species is extinct.
Thus too the objections by the "Democratic" (sic) Party are utterly meaningless. Do not forget it was as much the Democrats' treachery as the Republicans' agitation of the nation's ever-simmering, always-definitive hatreds into a New-Holocaust that killed the (obviously futile) effort to shape a democratic republic from a majority rabble of maliciously ecogenocidal, pridefully hateful religious fanatics, misogynists and racists.
That said, the infinitely courageous Heather Cox Richardson overlooks one point and is wrong on another. She misses the purpose of the unprecedented increase in national debt: it is to rationalize, per Grover Norquist, the permanent end of (all) safety-net services, Social Security and Medicare included. And she is wrong about a national throwback to the Great Depression. It is a throwback, yes indeed, not to the U.S. under Hoover but rather to Russia under Nicholas II. Only this time the population is already too subjugated by moral imbecility -- by selfishness, cowardice and self-imposed ignorance -- to ever overthrow its oppressors.. Which does (not) end our obligation as true humans to yet dare honor the remnants of humanity by the most defiant resistance we can muster.
''The Crime of Austerity: When Power Serves the Few''
What kind of person votes for legislation that knowingly harms or kills fellow citizens? Someone who has abandoned any moral compass in favor of wealth, ideology, or power. The proposed Republican-backed bill, as described by Senators Chris Murphy, Angus King, and Sheldon Whitehouse, is not merely flawed policy. It is a calculated assault on the vulnerable.
Cutting healthcare for 16 million people, slashing food aid for children, and handing massive tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy is not governance, it is cruelty cloaked in bureaucracy. The numbers are stark, but the human cost is starker. Rural hospitals will be shuttered. Children will go hungry. Preventable diseases will go untreated. Lives will be lost.
This legislation is not the result of oversight. It is not the product of economic necessity. It is a conscious, strategic decision to sacrifice the many for the benefit of the few. The architects of this bill claim to defend liberty, but liberty without healthcare, without food, without shelter is not liberty at all. It is a fiction used to mask greed. Their vision would return us to a pre–New Deal America, where economic suffering was a private burden, not a public concern, and where government existed only to protect the interests of those with wealth.
Read more at https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-crime-of-austerity-when-power
Americans can no longer afford governance by cruelty. We cannot tolerate a system that treats lives as bargaining chips in a game of political poker. Every vote for austerity is a vote against the people. Every bill that sacrifices the vulnerable is a stain on our national conscience.
The difference between animals and humans is supposed to be that humans care for each other other.
Exactly. The difference between animals and humans is supposed to be that we care for each other, not just our own, but strangers too. Animals may protect their young or act socially, but they do not have our moral agency. They do not build systems of justice or reflect on right and wrong. We do. That moral responsibility means we should protect the vulnerable, care for the sick, and ensure no one is left behind. When we fail to do that, we are not just neglecting policy, we are neglecting our humanity.
It's worth bearing in mind that there have been no recorded cases of animal genocide.
If the evolutionary basis of altruism really rests only on kin selection i.e. that it is an adaptive trait, that doesn't really say much that's good about us. Frans de Waal has argued persuasively for the existence of empathy in animals.
And they call themselves Christians. It’s the biggest con of them all.
Ain’t that the TRUTH. Christianity has had a lot of creeps over the years spewing BS they ‘found’ in the Bible … while in real life they were sexual abusers, monetary misers w huge hidden resources… messed up Christ’s message for so many people..
For an eye-opening glimpse of the true Christianity, read Robert Graves' "King Jesus," which is based on the tabooed "Gospel of the Egyptians." It quotes Jesus as proclaiming, "I am come to destroy the works of the female" and explaining that the only triumph over death is the elimination of life. Hence Christianity's two millennia of genocidal crusades, witch-burnings and sundry other torture-fests -- including the one now upon us thanks to the voters -- all its horrors rationalized as "god's will."
Our biggest problem today is too many Americans so intellectually strait-jacketed by the Cult of Mandatory Positivism, they will go to their graves refusing to acknowledge that we are beset by genuinely bottomless Evil.
Senator Lisa Murkowski is proof ELECTING WOMEN is NOT the perfect solution to our political crisis! PERSONAL VALUES matter just as much as gender!
Like Sheldon Whitehouse, I, too, feel disgust for the Senate right now. I am grateful to Heather Cox Richardson for her podcast, especially the commentary from the floor speeches of those opposing the big ugly bill.
With the bill passing, reach out to the House!!
Call. Write. Email. Protest. Unrelentingly.
Use/share this spreadsheet as a resource to call/email/write members of Congress, the Cabinet and news organizations. Reach out to those in your own state, as well as those in others. Use your voice and make some “good trouble” ❤️🩹🤍💙
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13lYafj0P-6owAJcH-5_xcpcRvMUZI7rkBPW-Ma9e7hw/edit?usp=drivesdk
"Are we locusts or are we honeybees?" asked Van Jones. Turns out, most Senate Republicans and JD Vance and, of course, President Trump are locusts. As engaged citizens, we can still be honeybees. Income inequality has only gotten worse since 13 years ago when Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? debuted. Trump's "big beautiful bill," which the Senate passed with VP JD Vance breaking the tie, will contribute to class warfare genocide via cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps) and Medicare. This "big bad bill" ramps up decades of class warfare in multiple, traumatic ways. Call House Republicans today and every day to demand that they not support this "big bad bill!" Ask them: How does the Republican Congressperson plan to use their Federal Employee Health Benefit plan in their home state when hospitals, outpatient care practices and clinics and nursing homes in their home state close as a result of these cuts? Had they thought about that? https://youtu.be/Tqs_oSS-Q38?si=mqdG0clLjEW5i4t2
Great advice. Agreeing on facebook is preaching to the choir (although I do it all the time). Call, write, email, protest to your members of congress and other outlets.
May they live in the shadows of guilt, regret, and shame all the rest of their lives.
We commit evil against all of humanity when we knowingly let our children die. That includes all children. African, Arab, Asian, Indigenous, American, White, Black, Yellow, Brown babies are all included in the scrolls of human lives.
As the wealthiest nation ever to exist on the planet, we also have responsibilities to repay the world for the tremendous good fortune we have been gifted. Contrary to misinformation, we did not become the wealthiest nation in history because other countries were "taking advantage" of us.
But instead of sharing our good fortune, we have implemented a cruel government led by a criminal felon who is a fraud who obliterates the truth. He insists that we tax the world with tariffs that our citizens pay, while he and his donors (aka those who pay him bribes and give him airplanes) are given tax breaks.
And the reason to cause all of this death, pain, moral disruption, and disgust is.... ?????????????????????????????????????????? Seriously, as Americans, we must ask ourselves one basic question at this stage of our country: "Who Are We?"
I don't want to give in to despair, and I believe we can overcome this moment as we have in other precarious moments of our history. This will be an unrelenting fight, though, and I'm inspired by the "No Kings" protests and MLK's belief in "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
"The ark of the moral universe" is indeed long, but the notion "it bends toward justice" is irrefutably disproven by any accurate reading of patriarchal history, which began only six or seven thousand years ago. Indeed that history proves it is our species most politically paralytic Big Lie, for the arc's true bend is toward ever more zero-tolerance tyranny enforced by ever-greater technological omnipotence. Or as Loreena McKennitt so eloquently puts it in "Caravanserai," "...the months of peace and all the years of war..."
It reminds me a bit of Ray Kurzweil’s term “the law of accelerating returns” (about how technology seems to advance on an exponential rate). Perhaps we can see that, as you say, this applies to all human behavior as history records in such tragic detail. There is a persistent self-serving attitude of those who promote evil in all its many forms we see rampaging around the world. Their evil is accelerating at an exponential rate. We are all in great danger from this worldwide cabal of criminals who have infiltrated our government via their stooges such as Humpty and Musty.
The Senate has of July 1, @ 1:28 EDST passed Trump's Big Beautiful Bill as I have read. The transaction provided Lisa Murkowski and goodies for her states citizens, the juice she needed to, I assume, continue to serve her citizen's interests. It is all transactional. And, the result is the destruction of all that good, right, and responsible for our civic lifes.
Let's start with the pollution caused by of oil from combustion in the engines of modern life. The Koch brothers (now one brother) and his political organization threaten the world much as Nuclear Weapons now are the key to global power, domination and fear. The problem is, our global economy runs on oil. That is, perhaps, the reason that Donald Trump wants to return to the 19th century. But that won't happen. The 21st is in process, and Global Warming continues unabated: the 'bomb' and its power continue to heat atmosphere. More energy, more heat and destructive energy to wreak havoc around the world.
Especially the Koch’s. So completely traitors.
The real Armageddon the fossil fuel industry is bringing us is the near-term prospect of an uncontrolled rapid heating of the planet, without mitigation by warm oceans that have absorbed as much heat and carbon gases as possible. The nearing catastrophe is being hastened by Trump’s attempts to destroy the renewable energy industry. They know that they are doing this, however they don’t care about the consequences. We are the only ones left who can support renewable rooftop solar, vehicles, etc. by buying such products; preferably not from the guy who sabotaged our government!
While that idiot Trump is talking up coal and ending subsidies for solar and wind, China is building the world's largest solar array in the Kubuqi desert.
https://www.powersystems.technology/news-pst/us-news/from-sand-to-solar-china-s-gigawatt-revolution-in-the-kubuqi-desert.html#:~:text=China%20is%20transforming%20the%20vast%20Kubuqi%20desert%20into,stretch%20as%20far%20as%20the%20eye%20can%20see.
The fact that we still cannot quit coal is largely due to developing economies, especially China, Indonesia and India, where it is cheap and abundant. In the US, which has abundant gas reserves, it's the most expensive form of energy. When the wind blows or the sun shines, wind and solar are easily the least expensive. However, coal use continues to climb. It hit a record high last year, with the IEA now forecasting consumption to increase slightly. Instead of a transition to renewables what we're seeing is an increase in all forms of energy to meet growing demands. Trump goes in the other direction, in favour of fossil fuels, because the fossil fuel industry gives him money. And now there's the insatiable demand for energy for data centres.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/03/trump-fossil-fuel-donors-data-centers
He's leading the country into a series of calamities, the worse of which will be the devastating effects of climate change.
Ergo, "Donald the Destroyer."
You know, I think he'd probably like that moniker.
THEY are going to do what they are going to do. THEN, WE are going to do what WE MUST do.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44096650-civil-resistance
The Fish Rots From the Head Down
Indeed. Those at the top of our government are well and truly rotten.
And now the devastation to the body begins.
I, too, am disgusted.
I asked Senator Daines if he planned to send sympathy cards to our rural nursing homes when they are forced to close. Also told him he is beneath contempt.
"Are we locusts or are we honeybees?" asked Van Jones. Turns out, most Senate Republicans and JD Vance and, of course, President Trump are locusts. As engaged citizens, we can still be honeybees. Income inequality has only gotten worse since 13 years ago when Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? debuted. Trump's "big beautiful bill," which the Senate passed with VP JD Vance breaking the tie, will contribute to class warfare genocide via cuts to Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps) and Medicare. This "big bad bill" ramps up decades of class warfare in multiple, traumatic ways. Call House Republicans today and every day to demand that they not support this "big bad bill!" Ask them: How does the Republican Congressperson plan to use their Federal Employee Health Benefit plan in their home state when hospitals, outpatient care practices and clinics and nursing homes in their home state close as a result of these cuts? Had they thought about that? https://youtu.be/Tqs_oSS-Q38?si=mqdG0clLjEW5i4t2
This is horrifying and barbaric. The bill is nothing but murder for innocent Americans. There is no justification for greed and money over a human life.
right on