If you think of the government like a restaurant, it makes more sense. Pretty much every restaurant has to deal with vermin, to varying degrees. Most of the time, the restaurant keeps it under control through regular cleaning, but you still see a roach every now and then. Maybe even a rat. So you set traps and you kill the fuckers. If it gets too bad, you hire a professional to come in and exterminate. If you’re diligent, the rats and roaches are extremely rare, your food is protected, and the customers never see vermin. But if you walk into a restaurant and see a rat crawling across the dessert display in broad daylight, that restaurant has a HUGE fucking problem. They have an infestation. The rats are eating well, and have become unafraid of being seen.

These monumental fuck-ups like Pete Hegseth are vermin. They are rats and roaches that are brazenly crawling all over the tables, out in the open in broad daylight. If this is what we the customers see, then what’s behind the walls and in the kitchen and in the dry goods storage is a thousand times worse. The American restaurant is infested. It needs to be tented and fumigated.

I see a legislative and legal way out. impeach trump for breaking the law

Sorry, I should’ve been more clear. I meant a legal or legislative way out that’s realistic. Even when we had the numbers to impeach Trump twice, we still didn’t have the numbers (two thirds) to convict him and remove him from office. The Schumer-Pelosi gang of octogenarian Dems isn’t going to control Congress with those numbers ever again. It’ll be at least a generation before the Democratic party has that kind of power (if it ever happens), and Trump will be long in the ground by then.

More laws and amendments to enshrine civil liberties and to clearly limit executive power. laws to limit money in politics and make clear that coporations are not persons. stuff like that.

There are two ways to ratify a Constitutional amendment. The first way is to get two thirds of both the House and Senate to vote in favor of the amendment, and then to ratify it you need three quarters of all state legislatures to approve it without changing the wording, otherwise the whole process starts over. The second way is to have two thirds of all states petition Congress for a Constitutional convention (34 states), and again have three quarters of all states approve of the amendment word-for-word (38 states). No amendment has ever been approved by the second method.

For perspective, in the 111th Congress of 2009 following Obama’s historic crushing win against McCain, the House was 255-D and 179-R, and the Senate was 57-D, 41-R, and 2-I (who caucused with Dems). This was the strongest the Dems had been since the 90s. To get a Constitutional amendment passed and ratified in 2009, Democrats would’ve had to convince 33 Republican Representatives and 9 Republican Senators to vote in favor of an amendment, and then assuming that every single Democratic state legislature is 100% on board, they’d have to pray that all 8 split legislature states and at least 3 Republican state legislatures approve it for ratification without changing a single word.**

For even more historical perspective, the last time Democrats controlled enough of Congress and state legislatures to theoretically pass and ratify a Constitutional amendment without any Republican support was between 1937 and 1939, and they still didn’t do it (though they did get a ton of New Deal stuff done).

Nothing would make me happier than for the midterms to turn into an alcoholic moment of clarity for the American working class, where “we the people” finally sober up and vote every one of these feckless do-nothing weakling scumbags out, and elect people who will impeach and convict Trump and all his cronies, and amend or straight up rewrite the Constitution to enshrine laws in favor of the people, instead of the monied class. It’s just not realistic.

dirty tricks for good though is impossible to fix the system.

I agree. You can’t fix the system with dirty tricks. But you can crush Fascists with dirty tricks. It’s not ideal, but it may be the only way to get them out. But like I said, coming back from that is the hard part. Once people in power get used to playing dirty, they never willingly stop. They have to be stopped.

**someone check my numbers in this paragraph, it’s 4am and I may not be mathing properly

I don’t see any legal or legislative way out of the mess we’re in when the current government (and about a third of the country) doesn’t believe in the law or the rules of legislation, and the so-called “opposition” party is weak and feckless at best, and complicit at worst. We either either get our hands dirty or have a civil war. I’m open to ideas that don’t involve wither one. but I can’t think of any.

Imagine trying to justify killing babies by claiming babies are involved in combat.

I test drove a couple of Teslas way back in the day. You know what the big selling point was? The “Easter egg” that shows the surface of Mars on the GPS. Oh, and the James Bond Lotus one. It was at that point that I realized this was not a serious company, and it was run by a dork ass 4Chan edgelord.

America is a huge fucking country. If you want to have interesting travel, there are PLENTY of places you can go within america alone.

I would love for this to be the answer for why most Americans don’t travel internationally. The US is massive, and it’s one of the most geographically diverse countries on earth. Just look at this list of ecoregions of the US. Also, damn near every nationality you can think of has made a home here, and they brought their culture with them. There are Congolese enclaves in North Carolina, Somalian enclaves in Minnesota, Cambodian enclaves in California, Indian enclaves in New York, Finnish enclaves in Oregon, French enclaves in Alabama… The list goes on and on. It’s actually insane how much beautiful variation there is here, both geographically and culturally.

Unfortunately, the real reason most Americans don’t travel abroad is far more depressing. The numbers that Dogiedog64 was citing come from a survey conducted by OnePoll, which wound up in this Forbes article.

In fact, survey results showed 76 percent of the respondents wanted to travel more than they do currently. The reasons they gave for why they don’t are what you would expect: mainly due to a lack of finances or just feeling unprepared and ill-equipped to venture forth into unknown territory. More specifically, 63 percent of Americans who have never left the country said an international trip would be out of their price range.

When you consider that nearly 40% of Americans can’t cover an unexpected $400 expense, it starts to make sense that so many Americans don’t travel abroad. It’s heartbreaking that we basically invented “grind culture”, and yet most of us can’t afford the same kind of vacation that a minimum wage worker in Denmark gets.

Most people wouldn’t, which is why this argument is a non-starter for me. When people say Dems should’ve played dirty to stop the Republicans, I just roll my eyes. It would never work, because the majority of people who vote Dem would never support that kind of politicking under normal circumstances. But now we’re at the precipice, and we are slowly finding out that even the most milquetoast Dem voters are willing to support the dirtiest tricks just to get out from under the grip of this techno-fascist bullshit.

I just hope we can find our way back to some kind of sanity once the dust settles.

I don’t know, but it just doesn’t roll off the tongue the way “cold turkey” does.

I can tell you right now, there won’t be a legal route to a new constitution without a civil war. There is no way that enough people in power would support rewriting that document.

I agree with everything you’ve written, but the meme is garbage. I don’t want people in power who will “blow through all the barriers”, regardless of what their intentions are. I want better barriers that allow for meaningful change while preventing idiots from being elected and selling our country out to foreign billionaires and corporations.

Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle now, and the only way to fight back is to blow through barriers, and hope that whoever ends up in charge creates better ones. Because if this is going to be the new norm, where we just disregard the rules forever, then we are done for.

“Quitting cold turkey” - I never actually thought about this one, but apparently it’s directly related to addiction (which seems kind of obvious now that I do think about it). When you quit an addiction abruptly, you sometimes get that cold goosebump skin like a cold turkey.

The Wikipedia entry on that one is a fun read. I’ve heard most of these possible origins before, but nobody is actually sure of the true origin of the phrase. It’s kind of frustrating, but also pretty neat that we still use a phrase long after we forgot where it came from.

“Bless your heart” is such a sneaky Southern saying.

Interesting. I always thought it was because the rain was so heavy it drove all the strays to seek shelter, so people noticed a lot more cats and dogs in front of their homes. I think a grade school teacher told me that when I was a kid. I like the dead animal version better.

I lived there for a year and am moving there permanently in a couple of months. Albania is such an underrated country in so many ways. It has its problems, but man, it is a bajillion times better than living in the US.

Albania.

A man should have goals.

It wasn’t that 6 year old kids decision.

That’s a 20% mortality rate. If vaccines had anywhere near that level of mortality risk, all the streets of every city in the world would be absolutely fucking littered with bodies. You have to be one dumb motherfucker to think this is some kind of vindication for your antivax position.

The MAGA hat trick.