I have a Substack and a Ghost (an alternative that’s better in some ways and worse in others). The benefit to Substack is that growth on there is very possible with little participation in the social media like aspect they have, Notes. Ghost, meanwhile, has made growth incredibly difficult since they don’t have that social media feature and you need people to actually sign up for your site instead of just clicking subscribe. It’s kinda frustrating because I genuinely don’t want to support Substack in any way but I write about videogames for almost 150 subscribers with continued and consistent growth and leaving that would be…annoying. What I’ve ended up doing is simply refusing to do any paid subscriptions through Substack so they don’t get any money from me and instead have made a buy me a coffee and will eventually make a patreon.

There’s also just the reality right now that most of these types of places have some Nazis on them since Nazis are now just chilling out in the open as opposed to hiding in their basements like they used to. There’s only so much you can do if you want to be on the internet as a creator.

Interesting how, if the OP’s text is indictive of the original version of the article, The Guardian had to change their first sentence from saying Trump placed his hand on the bible to saying just him taking his oath of office since he didnt place his hand on a bible.

Especially since “later” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here given that it was literally within days.

In fall 2022, ahead of the midterm elections, Garland opted to freeze both the classified documents and election investigations because of what some officials believed was his overly cautious reading of a DOJ policy not to take any public action close to an election.

So fucking fun how this always applies to investigations into Republicans but never into Democrats. We couldn’t possibly be investigating a Republican who isn’t even on the ballot within 60 days of an election but we absolutely can send a letter to congressional Republicans about new emails being discovered in the Hilary Clinton investigation a mere 2 weeks before the election despite willfully knowing it would be leaked.

I genuinely believe that Garland, a known Republican, voted for Trump in 2020 and was upset he didn’t win and knew he was going to be the candidate again so didn’t want to put the fucker in prison. Then went and voted for Trump in 2024.

Fucker should have been fired.

So what they accused Obama of doing in 2010, got it.

Ive been on hrt since 2016, so same. I’ve been stocking up on my estrogen (also switching to injections and lowering my spiro dose, which the higher dose turned out to be needless since my lower dose keeps my T down super low) so that I can at least have that for a year or more. Then there’s DIY. Such lovely conversations to have about losing care because the government doesn’t want us to exist.

I dunno about that, they’ve gotten rid of several anti-trans riders in the past couple of bills, including removing them from the BBB. The Dems in the Senate have almost always unanimously voted against anti trans stuff. Occasionally you’ll get a couple of defectors but usually not.

I imagine one of her stipulations would be to ban all trans healthcare.

Since noone is posting it, here’s a list of the states:

Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wyoming

So almost entirely red states that went for trump. I live in one of these states right next to an Air Force base. It’ll be terrifying if I go to some places this or next weekend and happen to see National Guard. Fucking nuts.

A lot of the increase in defense spending seems to have been in response to America being ruled by Trump and Europe realizing they can’t rely on us for protection anymore. Trump has talked about leaving NATO. When your strongest ally seems to be backing down from defending you, you’re gonna increase defense spending to make sure you can still defend yourself.

It’s so fucking annoying they use this “vote as a household” thing as some kind of way to say that they aren’t saying that only men should be able to vote. But if you make one single connection to another belief they have, that men are the head of the household and decide how it is run and what happens inside it, you can see their real beliefs.

Republican women, and especially evangelical christian republican women, are openly advocating for giving up their right to vote even if they don’t realize it (they usually do).

He was at the RNC last year and ripped off his shirt to reveal a MAGA or Trump shirt (I think it was one of those but it was definitely pro Trump even if it wasn’t directly MAGA or Trump text). So he was definitely an asshole. Even for more reasons than just being MAGA.

The lawmaker said Democrats are worried they would get the blame for a shutdown if they voted to defeat the House bill. The House is out of session for the rest of the week, upping the pressure on Senate Democrats.

Voters haven’t punished Republicans for their numerous shut downs. But that said, voters are always more likely to blame Democrats for anything at all.

In the article there are definitely some interesting points. Like how Elon would probably use the shut down to fire even more people. Or Trump would use it to take even more power from Congress.

I still think the Democrats need to stand firm and refuse to vote for it, make Republicans pass it via reconciliation. Shut it down if necessary. But there’s definitely a lot of possibly terrible outcomes to a shut down to consider.

They can and will pass it via reconciliation. Budget related measures are able to be passed with a simple majority vote.

He was elected to his FIRST term, at 70??? That’s fucking insane.

And they’re planning on passing it in the Senate with Budget Reconciliation so the Filibuster won’t stop it.

Didn’t know that, I’ll edit the comment, thanks for the info!

Edit that I hope I made in time for you to see: does that mean that the parties that are under 5% are waisted votes? So does the percentage of vote total show that the country is majority left leaning but because so many voters voted for parties that didn’t break 5 those voters won’t be represented and the seats that would have gone to leftist parties if they had broken 5 will go to the center left party who did? Basically, is voting for parties who don’t break 5 like Americans voting for Third parties, completely pointless?

Edit at the top: turns out, any party that is below 5% doesn’t make it into the Bundestag, so the multiple leftist parties that fell below that 5% were waisted when it comes to getting seats. The country though still has the majority left leaning vote percentage wise. I’m only keeping the original comment for posterity, some of it is wrong as has been pointed out by the Germans in the thread.

Interestingly, if all the center-left and the leftists parties all added up their percentages of the vote, they get roughly 51.2% of the vote. Now I’m not super knowledgeable on how that affects their Bundestag, but if that means that said 51.2 percent have a majority of seats, they could join together to make a coalition government and keep the far right out of power.

Course that won’t happen because us leftists love infighting and refusing to compromise with our fellow leftists for the greater good while the right easily falls in line.

Also interestingly, this could mean that the far right/conservative party is going to be put into power in Germany winning the minority of the vote overall for the second time that I know of. And we all know what happened last time.

Edit: And again, this is all preliminary so it could change and as another commenter mentioned the AfD is a pariah and is still unlikely to be a part of the government due to the conservatives saying they won’t be. But who knows, people lie.

Thanks for pointing that out! Fixed it.

I’m sorry, a week ago I was told by CBS and the poster of the article that 53% approved of Trump and called him Energetic and tough. The poster said that we can’t deny that the majority of people approve of all that Trump is doing. Now we see that actually his approval is much lower just like I was saying a week ago? That almost all of the approval rating polls show his approval as somewhere in the mid 40s which is significantly less than that CBS poll?

Huh. Maybe CBS was just trying to avoid the 20 Billion dollar lawsuit.