It's Official. America's New Dark Age Has Now Begun In Earnest.

Well, it's finally official.  America's new dark age has begun.  President Muskrat and his orange puppet and their cronies have taken over, and they basically hold all of the cards now that all three branches of the federal government are doing their bidding.  The ONE thing they lack is a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, having less than 60 seats, but that is not much consolation.  Especially given how utterly obsequious practically everyone even remotely in Trump's orbit has been lately.  I mean, in the previous several months, Congress couldn't even manage to get the No Kings Act passed, which would have limited Trump's power.

Trump wasted no time with his executive pen on Days 1 and 2 of his second term.  From pardoning January 6th insurrectionists to cracking down at the border (and attempting mass deportations) to unconstitutionally attempting to end birthright citizenship (!) to pulling out of the Paris climate accords and pulling out of the WHO to rescinding many of Biden's executive orders, to so many other things.  Some of the things he is doing are already facing pushback and/or legal challenges which can tie things up for a while, while other things can have near-immediate impacts, mostly negative and often very negative indeed.  And other things are just plain silly, like him renaming the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America", for example.

And they're just getting warmed up!

Oh, and by the way, did you see Muskrat giving...wait for it...what looked suspiciously like a Nazi salute (sorry, "Roman" salute), not once, but twice in a row to the innauseation crowd?  If it quacks like a duck....

January 20, 2025 will very likely go down in history as "the day that democracy died".  But to be brutally honest, it has been on life support for quite a while now, and now the plug has finally been pulled.  America has long been an oligarchy, and is now a full-blown plutocracy and kleptocracy without any semblance of shame or any attempt to disguise it any longer.  And with increasingly neo-fascist leanings too.

This is, sadly, to be expected in a society that has become so desensitized that it has clearly forgotten how to shudder.

One can only hope that it's always darkest before the dawn.  But after seeing so many false dawns in the past, that outlook has gotten rather, well, darker lately.

It's Midnight In America

It's midnight in America, and the sun may never rise again.

Well, it's official.  Trump won the 2024 presidential election.  Again.  And this time, we can't blame it on the Electoral College or Russian interference or anything other than We the People.  Or rather, about half of us.  

Only this time around, literally everyone knew what he was all about, and yet so many still voted for him.  So literally NO ONE can credibly claim naivety or ignorance (unless truly willful) this time.  They had an easy out, and yet they chose to go right back to Trump.  They are NOT victims, they are volunteers, often very eager ones, which makes them complicit with the oppressors.  In fact, in the two weeks leading up to Election Day, Trump deliberately darkened his already vile rhetoric even more to get more undecided or apathetic folks off of their couches to go to the polls.

I mean, they literally chose the rapist, racist, misogynistic, convicted felon, lunatic, and insurrectionist candidate over the admittedly imperfect but highly accomplished woman of color candidate, because reasons.  Or they simply didn't vote at all, or they voted third party, because they chose to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and we all ultimately got neither as a result. 

They had ONE job this time, and that was to simply get off the damn couch and cast a secret ballot for Kamala, the only person really standing in the way of Trump, and no one would ever have to know.  And they couldn't even do that!  And now that they have sown the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind!

Unfortunately, ALL of us will.

America is basically dead and done now, and it will truly take a miracle of miracles to be able to transcend this madness and come out the other side in one piece.  Of course, once could argue that America was already slowly dying for quite some time now.  The fact that anywhere near half of the country would even remotely consider voting for Trump in the first place, again, would have been unthinkable in a truly healthy country and society. 

So as the darkness settles in once again, we need to keep all of this in mind.  And once again, we all must #RESIST tyranny of any kind.  If you give them an inch, they will take a mile. 

This November's Election Is For All The Marbles

Listen up, everyone.  Make no mistake, this November's election is for ALL the marbles.  And not just because the Donald has lost his marbles (he lost them long ago), but because the stakes are even higher still this time around.  A vote for Trump (or a vote for any third party candidate, or not voting at all) is effectively a vote for Project 2025, the latest Republican agenda, which would lead America into Margaret Atwood's worst nightmare.  What they are proposing is downright horrifying to say the least!  And it is also a vote for the Trump-Putin-Xi-Kim Axis of Evil as well.  Some may say that this election is essentially a choice between World War III and Civil War 2.0, but we think that Trump winning would make it that much more likely that we will get the two-for-one special, barring a miracle of miracles.

And to those who say that their vote doesn't count because it is rigged and the outcome is predetermined, keep in mind that such a thing really only happens when the election is close, and it becomes that much HARDER to cheat when the election is not close.  We still haven't gone so far down the rabbit hole of kleptocracy that we have full banana republic sham elections--YET.  (Though if Trump wins, he could very easily make that the case in the future.)  And if everyone who was eligible to vote actually voted, Trump (and the Republicans in general) really wouldn't stand a chance.

The lesson that should have been learned in 2016:  if you make the perfect the enemy of the good, we ultimately end up with neither. Seriously. 

P.S.  To all of the young(-ish) Trump supporting men out there who are still smug about Project 2025 because of your gender, race, etc., read the fine print.  One of the things on the agenda is to bring back the military draft.  Seriously.  That means YOU too.  So maybe you might want to reconsider which candidate, and party, you are willing to support.  And to all of the Serena Joy-esque self-hating misogynists out there, who think they personally will be spared, well, remember what ultimately happens to Serena in Atwood's novel.  Don't say you haven't been warned!

Like the song "Freewill" by Rush goes, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."

This November's Election Is For All The Marbles

With President Biden officially dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, and VP Kamala Harris the most likely candidate in his place, the 2024 election just got that much more interesting.  This is of course right on the heels of the recent (and mysterious) assassination attempt on Trump (which we condemn, of course), which has apparently elevated him to "martyr" status among his cult-like base.  

Make no mistake, this election is for ALL the marbles.  And not just because the Donald has lost his marbles (he lost them long ago), but because the stakes are even higher still this time around.  A vote for Trump (or a vote for any third party candidate, or not voting at all) is effectively a vote for Project 2025, the latest Republican agenda, which would lead America into Margaret Atwood's worst nightmare.  What they are proposing is downright horrifying to say the least!  And it is also a vote for the Trump-Putin-Xi-Kim Axis of Evil as well.  Some may say that this election is essentially a choice between World War III and Civil War 2.0, but we think that Trump winning would make it that much more likely that we will get the two-for-one special, barring a miracle of miracles.

And to those who say that their vote doesn't count because it is rigged and the outcome is predetermined, keep in mind that such a thing really only happens when the election is close, and it becomes that much HARDER to cheat when the election is not close.  We still haven't gone so far down the rabbit hole of kleptocracy that we have full banana republic sham elections--YET.  (Though if Trump wins, he could very easily make that the case in the future.)  And if everyone who was eligible to vote actually voted, Trump (and the Republicans in general) really wouldn't stand a chance.

The lesson that should have been learned in 2016:  if you make the perfect the enemy of the good, we ultimately end up with neither. Seriously. 

P.S.  To all of the young(-ish) Trump supporting men out there who are still smug about Project 2025 because of your gender, race, etc., read the fine print.  One of the things on the agenda is to bring back the military draft.  Seriously.  That means YOU too.  So maybe you might want to reconsider which candidate, and party, you are willing to support.  And to all of the Serena Joy-esque self-hating misogynists out there, who think they personally will be spared, well, remember what ultimately happens to Serena in Atwood's novel.  Don't say you haven't been warned!

Like the song "Freewill" by Rush goes, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."