Originally published at: Mike Johnson Is Talking About Cutting Social Safety Net Programs — Again
‘They Have to be Adjusted and Fixed’ Austerity only matters when Democrats are in charge. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) signaled this week how Republicans may begin stonewalling and messaging about Democrats should the party succeed in taking back the House this fall. Buried at the bottom of a Washington Post piece about how the…
Mike Johnson’s Porn-O-Meter is on the blink again as he must be preoccupied with others things, making him more of a wuss and tone deaf than ever. 2026 mid-terms, Go Dems!!
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Someone has traced “8647” into the grass on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
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Let him talk. It’s cheap.
Especially when it is clear the he will soon be ex-SOH, making him even more flaccid than he is now, porn habits or not.
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If there’s one grandmother left unstarved, the GOP has given up.
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I said earlier and bears repeating:
Any talk of messing with entitlements, especially Social Security, has been a third rail for decades.
I’m wondering if someone other than me can smell the roasting political carcass of the remains of Mike Johnson.
Do they not understand how much of their constituency depends upon SS to survive retirement?
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Mickey Mouse has something to say to you Mr Speaker Johnson. And may I say emphatically that Mickey speaks for me in his gesture…
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I live on Social Security and my pension from the state of Arizona. I am not Mr Money Bags. Social Security is roughly a third of my income. So I can say it very much is a “electrified third rail” as to my voting preferences.
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For me, now getting used to not having a job income, my SS is about to become a whole lot bigger portion of my income.
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They should’ve used salt.
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They have to be adjusted and fixed.”
Mike Johnson is ignoring the alternative meaning of fixed
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“That’s your entitlement programs
term not applied to a ballroom, arch, or 14 million spent to paint a pool blue
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I have a game I have played with Republicans since the 1970s.
They always claim that taxes need to be cut.
The game is, when talking to such a Republican (which is most any Republican) I first ask them whether taxes are necessary to support the military. They will concede that taxes are needed for at least this function.
Then I ask them what the correct level of taxation should be. “Always has to be lower than it is” is no answer. There has to be a proper level of taxation if any taxes are needed at all.
I have never gotten an answer to that question, and it has been years since it was possible to even converse with a Republican even that far now.
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Bill Pulte has no national intelligence experience, whereas Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney in Manhattan and the former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has no national intelligence experience. He makes up for his lack of relevant experience by having a record of unequivocal support for Trump and his agenda.
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Or millions spent to drive a decaying meatbag around various golf courses
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I guess the Park Setvice is going to look for whoever walked the “8647”pattern on the grass with something to kill the grass on his shoes. Effing brilliant !! Good luck with policing that. Killing grass to make a political point is FREE SPEECH !
Another Fed. District Court has just said so in the seashell on the beach sand case. How do your catch or charge anyone in THAT case ?
Maybe the oysters, clams, and assorted mollusks are just not into Trump ? Who could blame them.
Trump is an effing moron per Tillerson. He deserves to be turned out of office, permanently, which is what “86” means to me.
BTW, Lee Raymond, Rex Tillerson’s boss at Exxon, just died. Brilliant manager but no friend of the planet. RIP.
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The preferred habitat for data center cockroaches is weak rural governance structures. A good example is the proposed Inyokern data center in Kern County, California. The usual promises: jobs, tax revenues, limited water use, and clean energy. Zero awareness of the extreme water table fragility of the Eastern Sierra or the risk of obsolescence and irrelevance within the next five years. Just a new kind of gold rush for engineering companies at a time when general construction is flat.
What is clear is that success in data center approval requires naive governance structures all the way down from federal, to state, county and local. This is not just in the US. Finland for example, has seen rushed approval of rural data centers for TikTok, Microsoft and Google, before the public grasped the implications. Small municipal governments are easily bowled over by promises of new tax revenue streams with no hard guarantees. I’m with Elizabeth Warren and Geoffrey Hinton (Google’s former chief AI scientist) that there is no rush. In any case, quantum computers will drastically reduce the energy demand and compute cost. US spending proposals range from $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion by 2030. Such nose-bleed levels of spending typically end with finger-pointing and collapse.
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The latest iteration of FoxConn, with a new emphasis on con.
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I’m not that confident that data centers can downsize due to quantum computers, which always seems to be almost here but not yet, like fusion power. The current LLMs are built around the capabilities of GPU chips, and quantum computing doesn’t work the same way. The applications, if and when they arrive, will probably be in different areas.
Anyway, one way to limit data center build-out would be to force them to use local power grids, instead of what they’re doing now with “behind the meter” power to build in areas with not enough local electric supply. This means leasing or buying big trailer mounted gas generators for powering the centers. A horrible environmental impact and basically a cheat to get enough power that isn’t available on the local grid.
Regulate against that practice. If you can’t get enough power, don’t build there. Which won’t happen with this administration and Congress, so we’re screwed for a while. But something we could do if Dems take the Presidency and enough of Congress in 2028.
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