Latest posts
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Republicans Know How to Win, Democrats Know How to Lose, Let’s Steal the Playbook and Keep Our Souls
If American politics were a sport, Republicans would be the team that shows up in matching uniforms, drills the exact same play for three seasons, and then executes it with a discipline usually reserved for marching bands and cults. Democrats, by contrast, would be the club team made up of brilliant but argumentative grad students
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“Democrat Layoffs” and the Great Shutdown Purge
Day five of the shutdown, and the White House’s playbook just got darker. At 12:01 a.m. on October 1, federal funding lapsed. By October 5, director Kevin Hassett appeared on State of the Union to publicly warn: yes, mass federal layoffs could begin—if Trump deems negotiations “going nowhere.” He framed this as a conditional escalation,
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“You’ll Still Be Paid”—But the Pentagon Says Nope: The Trump Shutdown Delusion
At a Navy ceremony touting 250 years of might, President Trump looked out over ranks of sailors and Marines and vowed: despite the government shutdown, service members “will still be paid”—teasing raises and calling the promise ironclad. Watching that, one might imagine gold coins raining from the sky onto fatigued boots. But the legal landscape
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Speaker Johnson’s Imaginary Health Plan: How to Invent a Shutdown Crisis in One Sound Bite
The playbook is simple. Find a bureaucratic chart so boring it could put actuaries to sleep, then scream into a cable-news camera that it means “Democrats are shutting down the government to give illegal immigrants free health care.” If you’re lucky, you’ll trend on X by lunchtime. If you’re Mike Johnson, you repeat it on
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The Shutdown Kings: This Was The GOP’s Project 2025 Plan All Along
It is a curious thing to watch a political party hold every lever of government power—White House, Senate, House of Representatives, and Supreme Court—then turn to the public with the wide eyes of a hostage negotiator and insist that it is someone else’s fault they cannot govern. It is like inheriting the keys to the
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Project 2025 Becomes Government Shutdown Gospel
It took exactly two days. Forty-eight hours into a shutdown that had already darkened laboratories, silenced grant pipelines, and furloughed three-quarters of a million civil servants, the White House finally dropped its pretense. What was once billed as a think-tank fantasy, a right-wing wish list too radical for the campaign trail, was suddenly elevated to
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Shut It Down (to “Save” ACA): Democrats’ Gambit or Political Pyrrhic Victory?
When the federal lights went dark at 12:01 a.m., they went dark not from incompetence but by design. On Day One of the shutdown, Democrats—led by Schumer and Jeffries—did something rare: they leaned into it. They embraced disruption as leverage. They would treat a government shutdown not as failure, but battlefield, by insisting that any
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Day One of the Fascist Purge: Russ Vought of OMB Plans to Punish Democrats
The shutdown was supposed to be about budgets. Instead, it has become a bonfire of the civil service, and the match is being struck in Russ Vought’s hand. On the first day of the shutdown, he told House Republicans that mass firings would begin “in a day or two.” This wasn’t speculation. He described a
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Fascism Shutdown Theater 2025: America’s 12:01 Curtain Call
The clock struck midnight, and instead of turning into a pumpkin, the U.S. government simply turned off. It wasn’t glamorous—no fireworks, no champagne, just a cold 12:01 a.m. ET at which point 750,000 federal workers were told to “take an unpaid vacation” and the rest of us were instructed to marvel at how “fiscal discipline”
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Shutdown Showdown: When the Federal Lights Flicker, Standing Ground Might Be the Only Power Move Left
Washington, D.C. — the unfortunate date when “the lights go out” became literal again. After the Senate failed to pass a stopgap spending bill, the White House ordered agencies to activate shutdown protocols at exactly 12:01 a.m. on October 1. Through memos from OMB and OPM invoking the Antideficiency Act, the chaos began: mass furloughs,