Makes sense.

GAO focuses on actual waste, fraud and abuse.

Republicans prefer DOGE, which focuses on hamstringing investigators and regulatory agencies, blocking funding for science, health and education, and stealing data.

I’m starting to think that 60 years ago or so, a couple of Harvard students humiliated Trump, and he’s never gotten over it.

And the worst part is that that’s what he does each and every week, and this past week still stood out.

As far as Pokemon goes, I’ve always been partial to the Team Galactic battle theme from DPPT. And though “catchy” doesn’t quite do it justice, the night theme for Jubilife City, also in DPPT, is tremendous. Walking into that city for the first time at night was one of the defining moments of my video game life.

And the Shiver City theme from Paper Mario is unforgettable.

I don’t think anything will ever beat Still Alive from Portal though.

The Russians called those “pogroms.”

In some ways the worst part is that he doesn’t even want to destroy them as part of some grand scheme to reshape the world - he wants to destroy them because he’s a fragile egotist with the emotionsl maturity of a toddler who can’t stand not getting his way.

Yes - absolutely.

The authoritarian personality is actually weak and frightened and terribly insecure. That’s a lot of what drives them - they have to have as much control as possible because the thought of not having control terrifies them.

Odd though it might seem, there’s a great lesson in all of this in the movie Tank Girl.

The villain, fittingly played by Malcolm McDowell, is a cold, sadistic, arrogant manipulator. He’s trying to turn the protagonist Rebecca, who he recognizes as a potential strong ally. And she not only defies him, but continuously makes fun of him and belittles him. He ends up sending her off for a particularly horrific psychological torture, at the end of which he calmly and malevolently expects her submission, and instead she’s still making fun of him. His pose finally collapses and shaking with rage he grabs a gun and points it at her, and she just looks at him and smiles and croaks out, “I win.”

The authoritarian has no sense of personal power. That’s why they have to surround themselves with the trappings of their adopted and assembled power - because that’s all they have.

There are two broad types of powerful personalities - the would-be tyrant, who preens and manipulates and schemes and struts and surrounds himself with conjured and desperately protected authority, and the stolid, quiet person who simply sits off to the side, wholly determined to manage their own lives as they see fit and wholly confident of their ability to do so.

And of the two, the latter is far, far stronger than the former. And the former know it.

Nah - sorry. I’m not buying it.

Granted that most of those at tte top are not dumb and are instead evil, greedy, power-hungry and entirely self-serving, most of the rank and file have to be dumb.

Either they’re so dumb that they think that the lies they’re told are true, or they know that they’re not true but go along with them anyway because they think that the face-eating weasels aren’t going to eat their faces, which is just a somewhat different sort of dumb.

The vast majority of them are that dumb. Even a surprising number of their politicians are genuinely dumb.

But yes - they’re most certainly not all dumb. The people at the top very much are not.

But even they realize that most of their supporters genuinely are dumb. In fact, they count on it.

As I said, it depends on where someone falls on the right-wing “credulous idiot to lying sack of shit” scale. They all fall somewhere along it, necessarily, with the rank and file almost entirely on the idiot end and the handful of genuine powers on the sack of shit end.

I keep wondering the same thing.

It’s especially galling when I see some cautionary piece in the legacy media about how some Republican policy “might” lead to some negative consequences. As if the Republicans are unaware of that and it’s up to the media to gently nudge them and point it out.

The Republicans are fully aware of the harm their policies are going to do and that’s much of the point. They quite simply want everyone who’s not one of them to die. They’re not only okay with that - they’re eagerly looking forward to it.

Israel is a rogue state.

That’s what they do.

Far right is a fundamentally dishonest position. It’s based entirely on lies - the lie that the nation/world was better off under some older system, the lie that the problems today are caused by progressive values, the lie that diversity is bad and racial purity must be defended, the lie that authority is good or even necessary, the lie that men deserve to dominate and women should submit, on and on and on, it’s all lies.

So when they lose, as they deserve, they just automatically fall into the lie that they should’ve won. That’s what defines their entire worldview - they claim a set of truths, and when the world contradicts them, they convince themselves (or pretend, depending on where they fall on the far right scale of credulous idiot to lying sack of shit) that it’s some sort of conspiracy to deny them what’s rightfully theirs, when the reality is simply that they’re wrong. About everything.

Heathers changed my world in more ways than one.

Weird that the Trump administration is trying to collect a national database on people with autism even as they’re eliminating programs to help them or even merely to oversee how they’re treated by other institutions.

If the goal of tracking them down and keeping tabs on them isn’t to help them, then what is it?

(That’s a rhetorical question).

Imagine not recognizing that central authority is the problem.

To the degree that fascism has a distinctive economic system, one of its most notable qualities is a combination of private ownership of the means of producton with government/corporate partnership and a “revolving door” by which powerful individuals pass back and forth between business and political leadership positions.

United Healthcare Group pays off Trump in 3, 2, 1…

I propose a new term - “malscurrocracy” - government by evil clowns.

Mm… yeah. I should’ve stipulated that nobody is doing anything to stop him (or even really to slow him down).

The Supreme Court and virtually the entirety of the Republican party - federal, state and local - are actively aiding and abetting him, which, yeah, does count as doing something.

Just the latest in an ever-growing string of obviously corrupt acts involving this obviously corrupt politician.

In less than a year, the US has gone from a nation that at least punished the most egregious corruption to a nation in which the highest elected office in the land is held by the most brazenly and openly corrupt politician in modern US history, and nobody is doing a thing about it.

The US is circling the drain.