The GOP House caves again, adopts the absurd, Orwellian, milktoast Senate budget plan instead of their own to get to reconciliation

Now they all take two weeks off.

House Republicans on Thursday adopted the Senate’s framework that will be used to enact key parts of President Trump’s legislative agenda, getting the blueprint over the finish line after a last-minute scramble to win over conservatives who had spent days railing against the measure.

The largely party line 216-214 vote marks a big win for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has pushed an aggressive timeline to advance Trump’s domestic policy priorities, and President Trump, who endorsed the legislation and lobbied those on the right flank to get on board.

Only two Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Victoria Spartz (Ind.) — voted against the measure. ...

More.

Normally you institute protectionist policies like tariffs when you already have something to protect, not before

But our Orwellian Republicans put the cart before the horse.

You can't return to something which no longer exists. The net trade deficit for 2024 is nearly $1 trillion, instead of flat like during the post-war up until Reagan, who first ran in 1976 against Ford, when tariffs still had something to protect but we listened to the siren song of free-trade instead.

That is why the Trump administration has had to cast about for at least six different reasons for instituting tariffs at the present time, none of which are at all convincing otherwise there wouldn't be six of them, not to mention that the math used for them is preposterous, or that they are the farthest thing from reciprocal.

The real reason for them, however, is that the tariffs, like the executive orders which now number over 100, are the immediate strings available to our Puppet Master, which he can pull this way one day and that way another, your ever present reminder of who is in charge around here. Suck up to him and he'll make a deal.

Trump's White House laughably brags about these things.

New taxes, which is what these tariffs are, are liberating don't you see!

Our mad King Ludwig needs this constant adulation. The tyrant has desires which he can never fulfill, Plato warned us.

But of course all this can be undone by the next president, which is no way to run a country. It makes for deep institutional instability and distrust throughout the global economy, for which few can reasonably plan.

The message remains the same: Expect Kaos. 

 

GOP in both House and Senate seem to agree that re-upping the 2017 Trump tax cuts won't cost anything even though it did the first time lol, $1.9 trillion over ten years according to the CBO

The Party now says ignore the evidence of your memory.

Reported here:

 ... At this point, senior House Republicans privately say they think House Republicans will accept the Senate’s push to use the “current policy baseline” accounting tactic to extend the 2017 tax cuts and claim it costs nothing. The biggest hurdle now is the vast discrepancy between the Senate’s targeted spending cut minimums and the House’s $1.5 trillion spending cut target. ...

Republican Senator Mike Crapo is full of Orwellian crap, says extending the Trump tax cuts which increased deficits by $1.7 trillion won't keep increasing deficits

 

 If you're not changing the tax code, you're simply extending current policy—you are not increasing the deficit. The bottom line here is that it's a $4.3 trillion tax increase, not a $4.3 trillion deficit increase. 

-- Mike Crapo 

Most of the tax cuts passed by Republicans during President Donald Trump’s first term, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), which raised deficits by $1.7tn, are set to expire at the end of 2025. ... Without new legislation, current law requires tax rates to return to their pre-TCJA levels. Maintaining the current policy would cost nearly $5tn in lost revenue over the next 10 years. 

-- Oren Cass

Passing economic legislation through the US Senate can by-pass the 60-vote rule if the legislation does not increase deficits beyond 10 years. 

The total public debt has ballooned by over $16 trillion under the Trump tax cuts.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, tariffs are tax cuts

 

What they mean is losing your money is part of the game

 

‘Volatility is part of the game’: What financial advisors are telling investors about market turmoil

The White House says Ludwig's tariffs are a tax cut for the American people

 

Not even ass-kisser Mark Levin can take the Ukraine BS from Trump

 Levin almost never disagrees with Trump. It's very revealing of Mark's priorities, which include the absolute rectitude of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

 

Mark Levin Defies Trump By Backing Zelensky and Trashing Putin — Bashes ‘Sick’ and ‘Un-American’ Foreign Policy

... I’m waiting for the first free election for Vladimir Putin. I mean, this is almost comical in a sick way that Putin is demanding an election. Why is he demanding an election in Ukraine when he doesn’t have free and real elections in his own country? ... I don’t know why there are people that not only oppose Zelensky, but seem to support Putin,” said Levin, attributing said position to a handful of pseudo-intellectuals” pushing “policies that in many ways are un-American in my view, and policies that if they had espoused these policies not that long ago, people would have wondered if they were on the take, or who they’re working for, something like that. Not that they are, but they would wonder.” ...

Levin sounds like Democrats at the end there, getting uncomfortably close to their charge that Trump has always been on the take from Putin, working for Putin, "something like that" lol.

Somebody should check the audio though, because, holy smokes, this whopper was in there:

There is no peace without slavery.

 

 

The master of The Two Minutes Hate

 

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Four Haitians took off in a gray, Toyota Tacoma, two men, two women, each with a goose in their hands.

 

Facebook deletes Richard Dawkins

 

Democrat leader of the Hamas Caucus in the US House, Rashida Tlaib, says Democrat President Joe Biden supports genocide in Gaza

Genocide is fast becoming as obsolete as fascism.

 

When only Wikipedia gets it right about leftist terrorist and murderer Kathy Boudin, you know the world is truly upside down

 

Killing is saving

 

The Orwellian situation in Kabul right now began Feb 29, 2020 when Trump announced that the Taliban would be taking over the war on terror

 You read that right, the Taliban.

How did we not understand this 100% crackpottery for what it was at the time?

Down is up, evil is good, enemy is friend.

Starting at about the 3:15 mark.

The damage done to conservatism by Conservatism Inc. is Orwellian

The very essence of conservatism used to be all these things, American culture, history, nation, heritage, family and faith, spokes on the wheel of its organic whole. But the libertarians have co-opted all that away and replaced it with an ideology of materialism which has erased the memory of it to the extent that the two, conservatism and libertarianism, are now indistinguishable in the popular imagination.

When Antifa thinks even the media are the fascists, you know we are still at Orwell's "meaningless" fascism from 1944

George Orwell, here:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

CNN caught being Orwellian: Peace through violence

"Someone on the left thought 1984 was a policy paper instead of fiction unfortunately"

Seen here in the comments.

"No free speech for fascists" is incoherent and Orwellian

Charles C. W. Cooke, here:

“No free speech for fascists” is an incoherent, almost Orwellian, position. Happily – and on a routinely “bipartisan” basis – the Supreme Court concurs.