volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@bruce The people of Los Angeles are not the point. Trump and Trump supporters would generally even consider the people of Los Angeles to be complicit or even supportive of what they see as occupation of the city.

To them the city doesn't belong to the people, it belongs to the United States, so they think they have ownership over it regardless of the people living there.

@ml I think it's important to focus on the larger picture the public has lost faith in journalism because journalism failed them in ways that caused them to lose faith, and the result was completely predictable. Journalism needs to fix itself.

Yes, your Muslim concerns are absolutely real and part of this picture. Unfortunately, it's really hard to address so long as journalism itself is so broken in the larger picture. If the press ever manages to change course then this is part of what it can fix.

We really need to call out journalism in general to encourage it to do better, and yes, this is one factor in that really sad story.

@gatewaypundit_official disgusting smear?

No, honestly the guy is a nasty, disgusting guy. Even if you agree with him or support his goals, he's kind of a gross guy. And again, maybe that's okay, maybe you want to put up with his personality to get to those goals. Fine.

But it's not smearing him. That's who he is.

@ksclarke I mean yes.

It was always a bad idea to take things that we want to last indefinitely and hand them to the executive branch of the United States. Doing that always relied on the whims of whatever presidents would be elected in the future.

That's how the United States is designed, and so many of us spent years warning about this.

So yep, the administration can dismantle The institute of anything it wants that have been put under its charge. That was an amazingly good reason not to put things under its charge, but we elected representatives who did it anyway.

So now can we please stop re-electing those representatives?

@jillL

Correction: like Trump knows?

Seriously, the guy doesn't know how any of this works.

@Nonilex

@RichardNairn

Honestly it might be a little bit worse yes, the US believes in checks and balances, but a whole lot of people balancing the power, checking the power, are all for it.

The system is still there. The problem is we elected people who like this.

@Yehuda

@bastardsheep not quite.

The conservative misunderstanding isn't about black and white but about magnitude. They are basically histrionic, nothing could ever be just a little off, everything has to be magnified a million times, and the same for good things: they think the economy is going to shoot to the Moon when really it might just be improved by a few percent.

Histrionic.

It's not that it's black and white, it's that every illegal immigrant is obviously a threat to the entire world order and must be treated that way!!!

I think it's important to understand this in order to counter them.

@stacey_campbell No that doesn't make any sense.

But what does make sense is making headlines to appeal to the talk radio crowd that Trump tries to appeal to.

Everything Trump does is dictated by whatever the talk radio crowd wants to happen. It's been like that since before he was re-elected.

It's really important to recognize which morons are setting the policy for this administration.

@relentless_eduardo when you pay attention to the people surrounding Trump, particularly in his public appearances where everybody politely laughs to bad jokes, and to the signal leaks, and to a bunch of other stuff it's really clear that almost nobody around him has respect for him.

They're all just putting up with him and manipulating him to get their way.

Musk finally gave up, finally decided it wasn't worth the effort to deal with this elderly guy who didn't know what he was talking about, so he quit the game and said what everybody else was thinking.

It's not ketamine. It's just finally being free to say what everybody is really thinking after it became apparent that sucking up was not actually going to help the US.

@ILoveAmericaNews

@Crell If you think the US is in a civil war, then I would say you've already lost the war because that's not what's going on here at all.

No, federal institutions are holding solid, and we need to use them to oppose bad policy.

We have a lot of bad things happening because people are simply not using the federal mechanisms at hand. And to buy into this idea that there's a civil war is to let the misbehaving people win it over.

@Crell If you think the US is in a civil war, then I would say you've already lost the war because that's not what's going on here at all.

No, federal institutions are holding solid, and we need to use them to oppose bad policy.

We have a lot of bad things happening because people are simply not using the federal mechanisms at hand. And to buy into this idea that there's a civil war is to let the misbehaving people win it over.

@RememberUsAlways

Oh actually, I just realized: today I was listening to an NPR report that misidentified employees of different branches of government. There are only three branches, and they couldn't even keep straight who goes to which branch. It's like they had a one in three chance and they failed.

Seriously, NPR has not been a reliable source for years now.

@RememberUsAlways Yes you said things. Yes, you got those things wrong. That's the whole point.

I don't know who told you this is how the law works, but somebody told you wrong. And I don't know why you would believe them because it's pretty nutty.

@Sandywb

@RememberUsAlways NPR hasn't been reliable for a while now, often reporting things that are contradicted by public records.

The Supreme Court speaks for itself. When NPR contradicts what the Supreme Court's public releases say, well, it just shows how unreliable they are as a source these days.

@maeve it's not the job of the SCOTUS to undo the bad laws the people we elected to congress made.

That's our job.

SCOTUS isn't fanning flames. It's respecting our choices as voters. And we should stop making bad choices.

It was clearly a bad idea. We elected people who did it. Ok then.

@BakerRL75 well right.

Blame congresspeople who set this stuff up. That's how the US government is structured.

If congresspeople that we elect gave the president this information, and that's a bad thing, then for god's sake let's stop reelecting them! It was clearly a bad idea!

Don't blame SCOTUS for giving a reminder of basic civics. Stop reempowering the representatives who, at best, don't know their own jobs.

@RememberUsAlways @Sandywb

What? That's not how SSI works.

YES wealthy people qualify for SSI, and mainstream Republicans are calling for increasing taxes on the wealthy due to their participation in the program.

@HeatherMJ from what I've heard, they have evidence up to videotaped, well, one step short of confession.

@RememberUsAlways What in the world are you talking about?

In every SCOTUS decision they lay out exactly how US law is based on the Constitution.

Anyway, considering the state of play, Democrats could take control of the House today if they wanted to. That they don't make those motions says a lot.

And I think it dovetails with your post here. They have folks convinced of this stuff, and they benefit by leaving control to the Republicans so they can spin these tales.