Top: Rep. Ellmers; bottom: former Rep. LungrenDaily Caller, the gay-hating, climate-changedenying website published by Swanson Foods heir Tucker Carlson, conducted a non-scientific (naturally) survey of House members asking if whether they would be willing to forgo their salaries while the government was shut down.
Result were skewed to make Democrats look feckless (naturally!), even though no Democrats voted to shut down the government. The Daily Calling reporting also produced a couple of unintentional bloopers, however — one that made a North Carolina tea bagger look like a wanton hypocrite and another that exposed the Daily Caller’s apparently casual approach to fact checking and out-of-date knowledge of who actually serves in the 113th Congress.
Watch a young California liberal go off on GOP Rep. Dan Lungren during a town hall meeting in his district last week. Lungren, a former state attorney general, is widely unpopular in the state, and was one of the few Republican House members who had a tough reelection in 2010, only managing to pull out a win after Karl Rove came in with a big ad buy at the end.
Hey, yelling at congressmen eventually put the tea party in charge of the government, so you can’t say it doesn’t work.
Garbage dump in metro D.C. area; inset: Rep. "Styrofoam Dan" Lungren, R-Calif
It has only been about three months since Republicans took control of the House and there are already signs that voter remorse is setting in.
“This is a case of the Republicans being spiteful and stupid,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)
The reason for this is clear. Republicans won the House by promising to focus on fixing the economy and produce “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Not only have they broken those promises — they haven’t even bothered to schedule a hearing on employment — they passed $61 billion in budget cuts that conservative economic experts predict would kill about 1 million jobs and stall or reverse recovery from the Bush recession.
Otherwise, all the GOP has done is waste time on the taxpayers’ dime with a series of gimmicks. They read the Constitution out loud (and bungled even that). They voted to repeal of health-care reform even though they knew it had no chance of becoming law and have yet to utter a peep about the replacement bill they promised. And they passed a resolution to encourage placing “In God We Trust” signs on all 9,000 federal buildings.
Add to that list of gimmicks their cynical decision to reverse part of the Democrats’ program to make the Capitol Building more energy efficient:
Why does Elon Musk get to decide fed workers’ fates?
We didn’t elect him to be the United States’ Potentate!
Let men of good will firmly resolve
That Musk is the problem he aims to solve,
Because the fact is, DOGE is indeed the Deep State.
“We are witnessing an extraordinarily broad chilling effect in American society. It is not just what you want to say, but what you are allowed to ask. It is about both formal government actions and informal threats, with threats of professional ruin or even violence from the President’s supporters. It is about both censorship and self-censorship. It is about a sense of collective fear.”
“Musk’s behavior is emblematic of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms.”
“If they want to try to annihilate Ontario, I will do everything — including cut off their energy with a smile on my face. …They rely on our energy, they need to feel the pain. They want to come at us hard, we’re going to come back twice as hard.”
— “Speaking Monday at a mining convention in downtown Toronto, Ontario Premier Doug Ford doubled down on threats to cut electricity exports to U.S. border states if the tariffs go through,” the Toronto Sun reports.
“The White House has become an arm of the Kremlin. Every single day you hear from the National Security Advisor, from the President of the United States, from his entire national security team, Kremlin talking points.”
“America’s abrupt turn from moral beacon and defender of the free world is unsurprising, given the fundamental immorality of the Trump administration. If you have the morality of a gangster, you will behave like a gangster.”
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Wednesday announced nearly three dozen deregulatory moves that he said would spur the U.S. economy by rolling back rules that have unfairly burdened industry, reported the Associated Press. Many of the moves would affect landmark regulations aimed at protecting clean air and water.
“The U.S. debt and deficit problem worsened during President Donald Trump’s first month in office, as the budget shortfall for February passed the $1 trillion mark even though the fiscal year is not yet at the halfway point,” CNBC reports.
The U.S. had ~172,000 layoffs in February, up 245% from January and the most in a single month since the Covid pandemic in 2020, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s also the most job cuts in the month of February since 2009, during the financial crisis. More than a third of those layoffs (~62,000) came from the Department of Government Efficiency’s federal headcount reduction. But it wasn’t just federal workers who were laid off: Retail was also hit hard, losing nearly 40,000 roles. Per CNBC, the sector has lost six times more jobs so far this year than it did in the same period last year.
“President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation,” Reuters reports. “The move, expected as soon as April, would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration.”
