volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@stacey_campbell

I don't know why you would be surprised.
Even Trump's own supporters occasionally admit that he says false things all the time, so why would he stop saying false things in this topic?

@randahl

@Beachbum

Well really, the problem is that they're on TRUMP's payroll, and he can't help himself from screwing up any deal they might be working on.

He's bumbled into setting up a situation where Russia's incentives are to prolong things as much as possible while these negotiators want to come to a conclusion. Their boss is working against them.

@Ulfh3dnar

@tcnicholls I'd go the other way: they're charged with the impossible task of reconciling their boss's incoherent and unrealistic demands with reality, so most of the folks who actually do stuff are running around trying to make it work.

Yeah, the headliners are just pretty newscasters, but the ones behind the scenes who don't show up on TV are probably working very hard to sort out the mess coming out of the Oval Office on a daily basis.

A Russian-Ukrainian peace deal is a great example where they're engaged in a complex task with Trump pulling the rug out from under them with his rhetoric.

@jackcole the key is that a sitting president needs to be impeached and removed from office first if he's so clearly done wrong as to warrant indictment.

And if the people we elect to Congress don't think the guy's done something to warrant removal from office, then it's hard to say we want him indicted.

THAT's why SCOTUS says you can't take such action against a sitting president. It's deference to the democratic process.

@TheOldGuy

@csgraves That's really all Trump and Vance have at the moment: talk.

Trump's not in Congress, so he can't introduce bills or vote for them. He can, though, use his microphone to drive the issue forward and keep focus on it, rallying his supporters to push their congresspeople to work on it.

And that's what he was doing. He COULD have let it just fade away, but he kept talking about the need for reform.

Yes, he is a stupid piece of garbage. But that doesn't change that he was promoting the effort.

@markmetz

@stevevladeck.bsky.social an administrative stay is pretty normal in a case like this just to give the rest of the justices a chance to have a look at it.

In other words, it's not that Texas needed the administrative stay but that the Court needed the administrative stay.

@Nonilex In this case the order comes as the court is about to release a ruling in another case that is very related.

There's a good chance the LA redistricting case would impact this one, so they might hold this one until that ruling is handed down.

@sand yep, and there is even polling and economic data to support that. The reputational damage is real, and it will hurt the US economy.

On the other hand, there are an awful lot of people in the US who are willing to make that trade for what they see as security and cultural problems of international visitation.

I'm not among them, but I understand them, and I wish they didn't feel that way.

@w7voa What I don't see addressed in the piece is that DOGE was the retasking of an existing office with its own legal mandate, and that legal mandate doesn't just disappear.

Maybe they mean that the office is pausing its work and moving resources elsewhere, but DOGE itself should still be there in some form as part of a bureaucracy that predated Trump.

The press often pays too little attention to these technical details that are so important to how the government actually operates.

@rhys I think it's important to hold responsible people accountable, including the Democratic Party for not having run a candidate able to beat even the amazingly weak Trump.

It was all so predictable when they made that choice.

We need to call them out so they don't make such a mistake again. And we need to stop reelecting the same ineffective Democrats who backed that plan and then couldn't hold firm in Congress.

@CindyWeinstein you have it backwards: Trump's dementia mean he doesn't really know what he's saying or doing, so it's those guys behind him that are really making the decisions, playing Trump like a puppet.

They aren't kowtowing. They're fighting over the remote control to control Trump.

@jackwilliambell It's not because billionaires.

The general public didn't want to go that direction.

It's easy to blame billionaires, but this is about the general public. Yes, it's harder to get a lot of people over to a different perspective, but nonetheless, that is the challenge.

Blaming billionaires won't fix it. It just distracts from the actual challenge.

@denisedwheeler.bsky.social

The key to remember is that a whole lot of people voted for Trump. Unfortunately, a functioning democracy reflects the will of people even when those people are kind of gross.

The downside of democracy is that often people kind of suck.