Originally published at: Mike Johnson Is Caught Between His Hardliners And A Hard Place
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender 
On Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had won over the right flank of his conference by promising at least $2 trillion in spending cuts to pay for the Trump tax cuts. By Friday, he was facing a mutiny from the moderate flank, as his vulnerable…
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This is promising:
Republican lawmakers [from WV, ID & KS] are pushing back against sweeping cuts to the federal government launched by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as their downsizing crusade begins to hit GOP constituents.
Also the leopard is eating Georgia now:
Georgia — which was ravaged by Hurricane Helene last fall — is still counting on billions of dollars in federal aid to recover from the disaster. However, President Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly stonewalling new requests for assistance.
Trump doesn’t ever forgive and Kemp was fool but where is Marge in all this? Shouldn’t she be delivering for Georgia??
TPM has buried the Weekender so it’s my thread today it seems (this will be boring soon 
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Idiots, top to bottom.
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I ran for Congress under a promise of always doing what is best for the people of Northeastern Pennsylvania,” said Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA)
To bad his little twit buddy Ryan MacKenzie next door in PA-7 doesn’t feel the same… Hopefully both of these two are serving their last term.
Patel May Have Perjured Himself in Written Testimony, Too
Perjury doesn’t mean shit if you are a Trump Republican loyalist. It matters only if you do not stay loyal to Trump. The dolts in the senate will vote Patel in anyway as long as he’s Trump’s DEI man.
Hate to break it to you, Mr. Roy, but the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 makes it clear that an executive official or the president cannot unilaterally change congressionally authorized and appropriated funds .
PFFT… like anything done in 1974 that would restrict Republican power means anything today.
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Where you are now, people do not keep their word. They have in fact, developed systems to make their lies seem true.
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Up is down, Black is white Axios is SHIT and cowardly
So according to Axios, the president now has unilaterally authority - without Congress passing a law - to rename geographical areas? So if Trump wants to call us the “United States of Trump,” Axios will go along with that?
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Whatever else one thinks of that PA Repub, at least he is pushing back on the cruelty, even if only a bit. It is much better that the Republicans torpedo those cuts on their own than have the Dems do it and then have the Repubs twist it into an argument for re-electing the same people making the cuts and destroying the safety net.
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Not for nothing the old saw about the straw that broke the camel’s back. They are nickel and diming us with hundreds of little things that individually amount to nothings but altogether become a very big deal. Republicans have been playing the naming and framing game at least since Newt Gingrich insisted on a particular lexicon for demonizing all things liberal, progressive, or Democratic (both large and small d.) And now, having done that for a long time, they are moving on to very big things because a lot of the pushback has ceased.
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It’s the beginning of the end.
But it was Volodymr Zelenskyy who really drove home the collapse of the transatlantic alliance. He said “The US vice-president made it clear: decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending. From now on, things will be different, and Europe needs to adjust to that.”
Discussing his recent talk with Trump, he revealed: “Not once did Trump mention that America needs Europe at that table. That says a lot. The old days are over – when America supported Europe just because it always had.”
He continued: “Some in Europe may not fully understand what’s happening in Washington right now. Does America need Europe as a market? Yes, but as an ally, I don’t know. For the answer to be yes, Europe needs a single voice, not a dozen different ones.
“We need confidence in our own strength so that others have no choice but to respect Europe’s power. And without a European army, that is impossible. Once again – Europe needs its own armed forces.” But how many Europeans, divided by the issues Vance highlighted, are willing to take the course that Zelenskyy urges?
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Sounds like no one has learned anything from this Senate. In its desire to kowtow to the First Felon, they will confirm Patel along party lines, just like they did Gabbard and Kennedy. There might be one GQP vote again, ala McConnell who has nothing to lose, but the vote will otherwise be along party lines.
No one will say ‘no’ to the continuing denigration of the US of A. We are quite and thoroughly cooked.
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It’s clear that Vance doesn’t understand how a parliamentary system works. Also, The firewalls he complains about are the consequence of denazification and the rebuilding of Germany after the war by the allies, in particular, us.
Germany had a historic duty to fight the return of parties with roots in nazism, Scholz said. A firewall was not about censoring AfD. It was about refusing to work with them in government.
“The overwhelming majority of the people of my country stand up resolutely to those who glorify or justify the criminal National Socialism,” Scholz said. “The AfD is a party from the ranks of which National Socialism and its monstrous crimes, crimes against humanity, like the ones committed in Dachau, were trivialised as just a ‘speck of bird shit in German history’.” It was a dignified rebuttal.
Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, was more blunt. Germany defended free speech but not fake news, he said, and hate speech and offensive speech remained subject to legal constraints and independent courts. He added: “We would never kick out a press agency from the office of our chancellor.”
Ouch.
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This is really key. NATO, along with the US’s out-sized influence has kept world peace for 80 years. But most of the generations that made that peace are gone and the younger generations, having known nothing else, don’t really appreciate the value of that hard-won peace. So it is being lost through indifference and power-grabs and greed. The fact that Europe, after all these years, is still unable to speak with one voice is tragic - they, of all people, know the cost of sibling bickering but choose not to deal with it. Also, with the massive US military machine protecting them, they have elected to forego spending resources on self-defense in favor of using that money for their safety nets and infrastructure. All those chickens are now coming home to roost in the persons of Trump and Putin. A lot of people will pay a huge price for that.
ETA An uncle of mine once told me that the organizing principle behind the EU was to create a structure that would allow disagreements to be dealt with diplomatically instead of being solved by war. What he did not say was that, unfortunately, the organizational structure of the EU is too loose to present a unified wall of strength against threats such as Putin.
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Mike Johnson’s “Porn Alert” meter isn’t working. The actions of Trump, Musk, et al are pornographic.
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to paraphrase our US VP speech to Germany: “we allow our citizens to wear swastika armbands, march carrying torches while wearing matching slacks and shirts, chant Nazi slogans, and so should Germany!”
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Can anyone out there imagine Tip O’Neill ceding power to Raygun, or Newt to President Clinton? And there’s Mikey, pretty much telling the sick fuck – “Sure, eliminate spending that was voted on by the House. We’re cool.”
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Yep. Sickening. We also let a whole lot of unreconstructed racists march around carrying the battle flag of the losers in our civil war.
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Re:impoundment. So what’s to prevent the House and Senate from passing a funding bill that simply states “$4trillion - President’s Discretionary Fund.” Period.
Quick, easy, and totally legalizes the great Convict Messiah to reward and punsih at will and whim.
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True, all of it. But I would add that the US gained much advantage: militarily, diplomatically and economically out of the postwar alignment with Europe. It wasn’t the EU sponging of us, in fact, IIRC we were actively discouraging European arms buildup.
The EU and UK should have seen this coming with Trump I.
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Winning friends and influencing people.
German chancellor hits back at US at security conference
German chancellor Olaf Scholz has shot back strongly in defence of his stance against the far-right and said his country will not accept people who “intervene in our democracy,” a day after US vice-president JD Vance scolded European leaders over their approach to democracy, reports the Associated Press (AP).
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I won’t go through the whole litany of reasons why I think money and mutual interest is what will hold the alliance together, but the short version is the US defense industry makes billions of dollars selling equipment to the members of the alliance. And they save billions by buying off the shelf instead of having to make all that hardware themselves.
US jobs are at stake here, including in Red states. Trump and Vance can bloviate all they want about pulling back, but in the end, they’re not going to take money away from the big US defense contractors.
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I would go one more step. The beginning of the end was when Chainsaw Trump pushed NATO leader Prime Minister Dusko Markovic of Montenegro out of the way at the 2017 NATO Summit. 2025 is the year destroying NATO will become normalized and the US will fall into Russia’s pocket.
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