American Politics from 2019 on

[pErvinalia]

All gang members.

[L'Emmerdeur]

In the Trump regime, 'human rights' funding is reserved for right wing ideologues.

'Trump Officials Want to Use Human Rights Aid to Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe'

For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries.

To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries.

This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica.

Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa.

This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.

That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.

“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”

[...]

[Tero]

Healthcare going to patients who are Democrats now defined as fraud:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ota-paused

[Sean Hayden]

“AI” said there’s potential fraud —Are they fucking crazy?
I’m not answering to anything ai told anybody, they’ll have to talk to my ai lawyer.

—//—

What else is ai doing?

[Tero]

Even with Trump disaster, voters will be hard to connevt to.
Google AI:
Partisan Disillusionment: A record-high 28% of Americans have unfavorable views of both major political parties. Nearly 45% of US adults now identify as political independents, showing a clear shift away from traditional party loyalty.

Institutional Distrust: Only 22% of US adults trust the federal government to do the right thing, and a broad 69% are dissatisfied with how democracy operates in the country.The "Tuned-Out" Middle: The Pew Research Center has identified a large segment of the population they refer to as the "tuned-out middle," who intentionally tune out political news and are not deeply engaged.

Voter Turnout Dips: While recent presidential elections saw high participation, midterms and local elections routinely see less than half the eligible voting population cast a ballot. This drop-off is especially notable among younger adults and individuals without a college degree.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The author of the piece quoted below is an expert in counterterrorisim with extensive experience. As such, any right-thinking Trumpist or MAGA fellow traveller not only can but should ignore what he has to say.

'The antifa terrorism threat the Trump administration describes does not exist'

Groups like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida have killed tens of thousands of people and have a documented chain of command. Antifa does not. You cannot decapitate a movement with no head, and you cannot sanction an organization that does not exist.

As such, the Trump administration created one.

The construction project began on Sept. 22, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The order describes antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” It directs every relevant agency to investigate and dismantle its operations.

Two problems are immediately apparent. First, no legal authority exists to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups. It’s a gap that Congress has deliberately preserved for First Amendment reasons.

Second, the order designates as an organization something the FBI’s past leadership has described as an ideology. Trump’s executive order asserts an antifa enterprise into existence and then declares war on it.

Three days after the executive order, the White House implemented the order through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which converts the fiction into machinery. The memorandum directs the Treasury Department to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund what it deems domestic terrorism. The memorandum instructs banks to file suspicious activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government’s financial intelligence unit.

That means the government’s financial surveillance apparatus, built to trace al-Qaida’s money in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is being pointed at Americans that the administration considers left-wing.

The memorandum likewise directs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals. That harnesses a network of roughly 200 task forces comprising over 4,000 personnel from federal, state and local agencies.

The wording of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 gives away the administration’s true intent. It identifies the markers of this supposed terrorist movement as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity. It criticizes the movement for its hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.

Those are not indicators of terrorism. They are political positions.

[...]

[Tero]

[L'Emmerdeur]

Mitch McConnell in his heyday and with a Republican majority in the Senate probably would have got something done, strongarming behind closed doors. Wrightgirl29's consternation when faced with the feeble gestures of the Democratic Party is legitimate, but definitely misplaced here. They're not remotely in charge of seating a replacement for McConnell. Arguably it's to their advantage if his seat remains vacant--one less Republican vote.

[pErvinalia]

Have we had any more proof of life?

[pErvinalia]

[Tero]

We still have a single leftists cable channel. But how long? We stull have CNN too, and there Trump attacked
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaitlan_Collins
at the dinner last night.

[Tero]

Mitch McConnel sad to miss Republican picnic with mutton:

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Monday that he will miss the annual picnic in Fancy Farm, Ky., the state’s premier political event that he has attended for more than 40 years, as he recovers from a serious fall at his Washington home last month.

McConnell has been discharged from hospital care but continues to recover at a rehab facility, according to a statement provided by the Capitol’s Office of the Attending Physician.

McConnell, 84, said he’s “working hard” to return to the Senate but needs to continue what he described as “intense physical therapy” that will keep him away from the Fancy Farm picnic, which is hosted by St. Jerome Catholic Church in western Kentucky.

“There’s no place I’d rather be on the first Saturday in August than with the good people of western Kentucky, feasting on pork and mutton,” McConnell said in a statement shared by his office.

https://www.koin.com/hill-politics/mcco ... to-senate/

[Sean Hayden]

Obviously these guys don’t actually work for a living, so who are the real heroes behind all the amazing things Washington gets done…

[L'Emmerdeur]

Would the regime of a wannabe dictator withdraw federal funding in an act of blatant partisan vengeance? Meanwhile denying that any such thing is taking place? Of course it would.

The Trump administration admitted that it terminated nearly 300 federal research grants “solely because” the projects were connected to states that voted against Donald Trump in 2024 and had two Democratic senators in office, according to court filings.

The administration made the admission in a court filing this month responding to a lawsuit brought by University of California researchers challenging the cancellation.

In the filing, the administration wrote as an undisputed statement of fact that on a list of more than 2,300 financial assistance awards across the Energy Department, 624 grants on these lists were designated either “termination” or “cancel.”

Of those 624 grants, Jeff Novak, the principal deputy general counsel of the Energy Department, wrote that in October the Office of Management and Budget identified 284 specific grants that were marked to be terminated.

Novak wrote that with one exception, “the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators.”

Novak added that the remaining 340 grants proposed for termination were ultimately not canceled in October 2025 nor since then.

“All such grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to President Trump in the 2024 election or has at least one Republican-caucusing Senator,” Novak wrote of the unterminated grants.

[source]

[pErvinalia]