no nuclear war in his first administration. I was never optimistic

Even Reagan got turned off from nuclear war via a TV movie. He tried instead for a Soviet-style parade, wasn't able to put it together. This term, it's probably going to be a drone and special forces-heavy war with Mexico.

... upon djt's orders,... off the coast of Florida before it had a chance to make landfall.

Someone or maybe a handful of White House aids who knew something about nuclear fallout convinced djt that was a bad idea and nuclear fallout escaped having been tangled in the eye of the storm with 120mph winds.

Oops,... the entire southeastern United States became inhabitable because djt thought nuking a hurricane was a good idea. Djt's hairbrained idea intended to turn a Category 5 hurricaine into a drizzle of light rain.

This djt buffoon of a flaming idiot thinks he is the smartest person on the plant because his uncle was a professor at MIT.

I chewed out a friend or two for acting like he was finished
when he totally wasn't
over and over again

resides in time the destroyer. There is a chance it will take its fill of TFG who is headed to his eighties.

Also, the world seems to me to be at a stage of rapid change. Given the natural confusion of world affairs, the TFG may be knocked off his pins by crisis. That may deter his domestic policy and generally lame ducks spend more time on foreign policy than on domestic affairs. His congressional majority is slim. How much radical change he can effectuate by needing both houses is not clear at all.

But then again Cassandra was always right.

Unfortunately, that leaves us with JD Vance who is far more of a religionist than Trump.

health (knock on wood), I'm nevertheless worried that despite him being older and shit shape, the asshole will actually outlive me!

outlive him and see a new world born of hope. He can’t take away our dreams of a better Country.

Unfortunately for all of us, there’s the guy already getting hard-ons about being next in line if trump dies sometime during this coming term. Vance waiting in the wings gives me NO comfort whatsoever.

I’d never in a zillion years have believed I’d be wishing it was Mike Pence.

is F'ing things up. Not just that, but F'ing things up in a BIG way and in a very short amount of time.

I'm AMAZED at the amount of damage he was able to do in 4 years. And that was all without practice and without real help.

So, I'm not depending on time to do anything but help him.

But really, the ONLY thing he is good at. He is a master at it.

Unfortunately.

Sigh.....

suppression and roadblocks SHitler's DoJ will put in their way, there's a more than 50% chance MAGAts will refuse to certify the election.

I don't know who these people are who keep giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, but I suspect they've lived pretty cushy and sheltered lives and have never encountered people who are truly evil.

The delusion was strong. One voter from Arizona commented, “I voted for him because I thought he was really smart and really good with money. And then also health care. I think it’s really cool that he’s going to take on fighting the big health care corporations that are charging insane amounts and hopefully get that under control.”

He promised to kill the ACA and has no intention of even trying to reduce drug and healthcare profits!

Another voter from New York said, “I voted for Donald Trump because I like the way that he was with other leaders. He wasn’t just like, “Oh, yeah, let’s be friends.” He threatened them, and he had to because they were killing our economy.”

He seemed not to know that no one was killing our economy, which has recovered better from Covid than any country in the world. I despair for the future because the news has become so slanted toward both lies and deliberate lack of economic reporting.

Here’s the article if you have the fortitude to read the excuses people gave for voting for the felon.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/10/opinion/trump-voters-second-term-focus-group.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gU4.Vzad.98Yg29Ux5yxC&smid=url-share

We have a serious problem with mental illness in this nation.

I have said that same thing for a while.

Indeed

Even more astounding is that so many voters in this country could be as ignorant as this small group was. Very depressing.

They wanted someone who looked the part of "Tough president that will be dominant and save us from wokeness and change! And bring us back to a time before all this diversity nonsense!"

Put me on the Cassandra roster too. I am truly not a pessimist, but sadly have far sight and can connect dots so many others don't even see.

Years ago, I read some articles about people who get depressed a lot. Studies have shown most of them are actually realists who tend to be good natural analysts. People who are really happy all the time generally have a lesser gasp of realities.

What is going on now, well, I have seen it coming for over 3 decades. And it's gonna get worse. Trump is NOT the root problem. He is actually a dim witted tool who thinks he is the big winner while the real powers just humor him. He won't live much longer, and those puppet masters play a long, multi-generational game. His replacements are already lined up and in 'training' by the real threats to humanity.

Here on Asylum Earth, the worst of the crazies have a stranglehold on just about everything, and they are drawing us into another very dark age.

soulmates so to speak.

ps - I would just add that the worst of the crazies are sociopaths with way too much money -- but you already know that; point being we can prevail only by dealing with the "money" issue -- capitalism. Crazies with money will always pursue power and control. Maybe it's hopeless.

Trying to remain optimistic is taking more energy than I have left. We are seeing the richest guys trying to get to Mars instead of trying to get policies to make Earth habitable for a longer time.

We are a very flawed species and extinction seems pretty much guaranteed.

Four decades, yep.

The "No New Taxes" obsession to get the government "down to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub" was a factor in the transformation from a liberal democracy to one teetering on the edge of autocracy. Knocking off any Republican who didn't sign the Club for Growth pledge on taxes through primarying those who didn't, helped bring the party in line. That's the era in which the brand of the GOP was promulgated through message discipline, about being for Family Values and Limited Government. (I'm racking my brains for the third leg of the brand – was it Strong National Defense?)

The end of the Fairness Doctrine occurring simultaneously with the rise of little-regulated cable television, which led to RW talk radio and FOX News, with the rapid growth of ultra-conservative billionaires' funding think tanks, research, university seats, scholarships, and funneling people into careers in the punditry ALL helped those wanting to undermine liberal points of view and policies rise quickly and blanket much of cable and even the airwaves. Constant accusations of "liberal media bias" were effective in "working the refs." And the final piece of the poisonous stew was unregulated social media.

The work done by the RW media and their political demagogues to cause their audience to believe things that aren't true is the major cause of what has happened in these last decades: that Dems / blacks / Latinos / immigrants / trans and others in the LGBTQ+ community are disgusting, subhuman, wrong-headed at a minimum and dangerous. The loss of empathy signals the conditions to cause harm. It's part of the training program for soldiers so they can carry out the hardest of tasks, killing another human being. That's why racist labels (like coon, spic, gook, etc) rise in wartime.

The propaganda system effectively brainwashes wide swathes of Americans now, so there are non-facts (lies? nonsense?) that are believed to be true. We have become essentially ungovernable, at least in many areas.

It's hard to know that each of these things were inexorably leading us to the verge of losing our democracy. In some ways the handwriting has been on the wall a long time. It's not like our democracy was in a healthy condition these last 20-30 years. But one could hope we could turn things around.

It's an exhausting trait, isn't it?

The fascists count on people having short attention spans and little interest in following anything that doesn't immediately affect their current situation. Makes them very easy to manipulate with well honed narratives.

One of the worst practitioner of if you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em was Newt Gingrich, a wholly self-serving creature whose oversized and infantile ego set the downfall of objective conservatism into high velocity motion. And he still pops up as he fights to remain relevant. The powers that by used him up and tossed him aside, as they do all their tools and patsies. Other current pols should have noticed they are just tools to be used for a time. But they all have rather grandiose views of their own importance and can't see the trash man coming for them when the new shiny chap comes along.

Pathetic fools leading low info fools astray. The biggest weakness for out democracy is human nature in the lesser evolved, more self centered, humans; they are so easy to manipulate into doing the dirty work for the real powers.

Gingrich the Newt (as the Austin Lounge Lizards branded him) is indeed a wholly self-serving creature.

Tucson's KXCI used to play them, maybe still do, but I am on the wrong side of the mountains to get the signal. May have to listen online again.

"Teenage Immigrant Mothers On Drugs"

I'm near Austin so get to hear them in person every so often.

Great stuff

and followed

Gotcha back. Thanks for connecting.

Taking a page from the Authoritarian Handbook, TSF will seek to strengthen his hold by going to war with…someone. I’m guessing Mexico, but his ‘Great State of Canada’ talk is worrisome. He’s also nuts enough to join Putin in ‘stabilizing’ Ukraine. Ridiculous as this sounds, don’t count it out.

That nut case is the Mad Hatter's milliner

So I got really good grades.

Count me as one of your fans, Tommy Carcetti!

of course, the asshole choking to death on a McDonald's cheeseburger the day after the 2020 election. Now your OP really worries me Tommy so, please, no more predictions!

ps - unless they involve bright, shining sunshine, warmth, joy, gaiety and enlightenment.

We are talking about an entitled and enabled megalomaniac in charge of the most powerful weapons, (literal and figurative) in the history of mankind. 'I am your retribution' is going to run everything.

We lost over a million people 'quietly' in bed to COVID under this person in one year. He is going to be doing things much more intentional and direct this time.

I can hardly believe my fellow citizens purposefully chose the literal Anti-Christ.

Most people referring to her haven't read the book. I know what you mean: unrealistically optimistic predictions because we don't want to face reality.

Even Pollyanna would have had trouble finding something real to be "glad" about, as she would put it, in this situation.

listen and believe Cassandra. Not sure if anyone is getting this one "Oh, he'll change, he learned from when he was in office the first time." Uummm, yeah, he learned: how to be a worse tyrant.

About the whole "tariff" issue. "It's all bluster," they say. "He can't really do what he's planning." Bullshit. With GOP majorities in the House and Senate, and a SCOTUS who is on his side, he can do whatever he fucking wants to.

that we had a literal "trade (tariff) war" his first term?

Just a small handful of examples -

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142008033
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142010290

Aftermath -

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142015488
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142029427
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142194692
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142354544
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142366937

paid by the plebs. That's what tariffs would be and that's why I think they have a too-good chance of passing.

The House & Senate members rely on lots of campaign money. I doubt the majority of them will cross the richest check writers.

If you accept the *cyclical theory of history, we are about to enter a crisis period. Europe is uneasy, Putin is overextended, Asia is testing limits, and the Middle East is a powder keg. And we have the dumbest, most incompetent fool about to take office. God help us all.
*The theory says that crisis is followed by recovery, creativity, decay and a return to crisis. The cycle takes about 100 years, give or take. The last big one was WWII so that's been almost 80 years. No question we've seen decay. Convince me we're not on the edge of crisis.

Aside from putting all the high tech we rely on now, it means greater risks of violence. About every 11 years, ol Sol kicks up and zaps the solar system with a extra doses of nasty flares. In the past, that has generally coincided with especially violent times among the residents here on Planet Insane Asylum. We seem to be witnessing just that, as you pointed out. Oh goody! Communication satellites and other tech we rely on at greater risk as resources dry up and tempers flare. We are beasts with the means of our own destruction in our hands.

The ultra rich know things are gonna get worse and they want all the resources to protect their own selfish asses. Anybody recall back in the bush years, retired underground missile silos were being sold and some were making them into cozy homes? I remember and took it as a sign of trouble not too far ahead. Well, that is now and the rich are just about at the point of picking their teeth with our bones.

A few weeks ago, read that Musk was buying a bunch of big homes in a Texas neighborhood and plans to install all his ex wives and children there. Guessing he wants everybody together so it is more cost effective to protect them from things like desperate people. Yeah, he's all about efficiency and shit. Eat the rich might become more than gallows humor.

The ice man cometh, and the band plays on.

on edit: put in missing phrase for clarity

I agree 1000%.

However that plays out.

Trump learns the wrong lessons

So this time, he is nominating loyalists over people with expertise.
When things go wrong, he does not take responsibility but blame others.

He is nominating people incompetent or have goals contrary to the agencies that they will lead.
Over 75 Nobel laureates have written an open letter opposing RFK Jr's nomination.

Also, last time he tried to repeal ACA, he lost his GOP majority in Congress.

Since, he has such a narrow margin already, will he try to repeal it again over the next 2 years.

Even if they do nothing, some ACA subsidies expire at the end of 2025.

It this are not approved, some premiums would rise; some people may let their coverage lapse.

I don't assume much anymore.

I mean that quite literally. He’s a textbook, checks-ALL-the-boxes malignant narcissist. He suffers from an extreme, and deeply buried, sense of shame and inadequacy. To shield himself from psychic injury, he projects bravado, bluster, arrogance, superiority, and power. But to keep that façade going, he needs the constant praise, flattery, and adoration of others to confirm he’s all of those things and more. He’s like a bucket without a bottom: no matter how much you pour into it, the bucket can never be filled. His need for praise and validation is insatiable.

And if he *does* feel injured, either through criticism or any attempt to hold him accountable for his wrongdoing, he will lash out and seek to DESTROY the source of the injury. And his malignancy manifests in the sense of pleasure, even glee, he feels at the pain he inflicts on his detractors. The greater their pain, the more he enjoys it.

Such a person can never be a “good leader”. He is, and always will be, motivated by self, by his insatiable appetite for praise and power. He is incapable of caring about anything else.

I am horrified that so many people find this utterly despicable, completely meritless individual admirable.

He has absolutely no redeeming qualities. Nada, zip, zilch.

Anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't expect anything else.

Best not to expect it.

Test for it first.

based on his terrible choices for cabinet positions. He made terrible choices the first time.

... and what they say they won't do, they will. They are incapable of telling the truth.

-- Mal

Never trust words from their mouths.

What they do is what is real.

even for convicted felons.

It seems obvious our hope is misplaced this time. Yet, even my cynical (by education, training and experience) self hopes many in the GOP will be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future and change their grifting ways as a consequence.

He had his chance and effed it up. Which is why it's incomprehensible to expect anything different.

Beyond it being worse, that is.

One can hope. I see a Cabinet and high level advisors who lack the ability to 1) work together as a team following Trump’s agenda; and 2) catastrophic natural disasters will get much much worse.

An additional fact is that none of these folks have any ties to or experience with the legislative process of “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

Plus I fail to understand how people who make $8,000/hr convinced Americans that folks making $7.50/hr are the problem?

We're gonna have a hell of a fight on our hands. Because my ancestors and my father didn't make their sacrifices and shed blood just so some spoiled rich brat from Jamaica Village (Jamaica, Queens is much rougher and Nassau County is much richer) Queens to just walk in and be king. I don't give a good god damn what those konservative klowns on the Supreme Court say.
White people keep asking Black folks like me, "what will it take to make it good again between us?" It'll take a John Brown type of effort. For us Black folks, it's just "Tuesday in Amerikkka". And we know we're going to have to fight to save the rights our ancestors fought hard to get. And we ain't giving up s*it. You want to make it good again? Get into that fight, do what you can and have our backs. Earn it! Especially with Black women-they got betrayed and they took it real hard. Y'all got a long row to hoe; better get to it.
Meanwhile, this is the mission statement:

And unlike my friends, I don't believe it's just a matter of weathering another 4 years and then things will magically return to rational sanity...

11 years ago , my family decided to take our inheritence buy and move to a kona coffee farm .

we named our 3 generation farm after Cassandra . We expected turmoil in the future .
We wanted to be able to midigate to coming turmoil by focussing on local Community.

there have been many sacrifices to live here , we were city dwellers before . Did you know
when you live in Hawaii there are many things you can't get shipped here ?

the loss of many modern convienence was well worth it for us .

Stay safe out there DUers

high-level opponents, and--yes--- even execute them given the opportunity.

But I was not in a coma 2017-21, and I know what he did then. There's nothing to be optimistic about the next four years.

We have to think we're a serious underground of the Democratic Party.


We have to turn away from pessimism and get serious about the future.
Think less about your suffering and more about the future. Think about

What the party platform should look like for 2028.

What billionaire donors look to want in 2028.

What Americans will need in 2028 and beyond.

Feeling quite fed up with all of these crazy we know better than you people who keep lying about everything and kissing the orange psycho’s ring, etc. If I had listened to the warning right away in 2016 we wouldn’t be here anymore. My father would be alive. The first night that he was elected I had a severe anxiety incident and a premonition that something awful was going to happen and it did and now my father is dead.

The good news is that Putin and his buddies are failing around the world. Trump will not have the support from outside the US that he needs. He will be left to his own stupidity and ego. He will not accept any help from anyone, because his ego demands that he is the only one who can fix this...

Think about martial law in Korea, Putin's buddy could well be run out of office by year's end.

Syria has fallen, and Russian bases in Syria are being evacuated. Putin cannot afford to support Assad any longer because he's short of funds.

Ukraine is amping up it's efforts to take back their country from the weakened Russian army. Putin is so desperate that he is using NK soldiers as the latest cannon fodder.

Belarus may be next to fall. They are watching what happened in Syria very closely.

It turned out to be true -- unfortunately true even after we rid the fucker from our White House. This time will be no different, except I expect everything to happen at an accelerated pace this time around.

A lot of voters also fell for his shit. One I talked to after the election gave me the whole, "yeah, I don't like how he attacks people, but I think he'll be good for the economy" bullshit. Having said that, I don't really think that's even the case. I think they just say the "yeah, I don't like how he attacks people" part because they don't want to be labeled as being hateful bigots like him. When it comes to voting his ass out when he inevitably, once again, runs our nation into a ditch, those idiots will probably still stick by him. It will be those that were aroused into voting his ass out in 2020 but sat out in 2024 because McDoubles went up a few quarters will be the ones that rid us of MAGA again in 2026 and beyond.

At this moment in time.

They are busy handwringing over the last election and not busy planning meaningful opposition.

I am going ahead and predicting it here. The opposition will emerge not from party, but something like the Gen Z protests in Kenya when some policy finally pushes people to a breaking point. https://www.csis.org/analysis/taking-charge-gen-z-leads-historic-protests-kenya