One good thing.

In my last post, which was a while ago, I wrote: : "There is a real, if messy, pro-democracy movement in the United States. The official leadership of the Democratic Party just isn't part of it. We need new management."

Some things have changed since then, and some things haven't. Democratic leadership did rise to this particular occasion by (so far) refusing to strike a shitty, illusory deal, and instead allowing  Republicans to shut down the Government and at least symbolically "defund" the murder mayhem machine. True, the regime is stealing funding approved by Congress for other purposes and redirecting it to their Secret Police and other favored horrors, but that's them breaking the law. As I've written before, there is value in forcing them to break the law in order to do the things they want to do.

Also, I still think the "health care health care health care" strategy is limited and could, under a more strategic regime, box the Dems into providing votes for a phantom deal. However, it is working right now and the Government is "unfunded" as we speak. It's not a perfect plan, but anything that makes dictatorship more difficult for them is worth doing. Sand in the gears, resist at all levels, make it hurt. And we know it's causing Mike Johnson and Republicans at least some pain because the Republican shutdown has got them pretending to care about someone else's pain, in this case the people they are not paying and the people they are throwing out of their jobs altogether.

So let's put this to rest right now: Every single one of the firings we are seeing was written on Project 2025 stone tablets well before Trump2 stumbled into the now-gold-plated office. 

Democrats should reset their talking points to include: 

1. Republicans run the entire Government. If Government isn't running, it's the Republicans not running it. 

2. Republicans blaming Dems for the firings of workers or shuttering of agencies or impending plane crashes is fucking ridiculous. The destruction they are visiting on the country--including the illegal firings--was inevitable once Trump was re-elected.

Republicans and so-called Conservatives have been working on and planning to and salivating over gutting the federal government for years. Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 was in the works in 2022, and its little brother, Trump's Agenda 47, oozed out of the cesspit the next year (Go back and take a look if you have the stomach for it; yes, he did in fact tell us exactly what he planned to do. Anyone pretending they "didn't vote for this" is either lying, delusional, or too stupid to live free. And anyone pretending that the pretenders aren't pretending should not be listened to). Grover Norquist joined Ronald Reagan's "Government is the problem" team in the 1980's. Point is, this is a decades-long project and Dems got nothing to do with it.

There is literally NOTHING any of us can NOT do that will keep them from doing what they want to do, intend to do, have already planned to do anyway. They will never stop. We will have to DO THINGS to stop them. 

And any Democrats wobbling over ridiculous Republican accusations (every accusation is a confession) or soggy "Won't Democrats pay a price?" questions from NewsBots or pointing fingers at other Dems for being too much or not enough, should be fired into the sun and replaced with humans who understand the war we're fighting and the battlefield on which we're fighting it.

So we have done this. We have called and written our leaders and they have, so far, stood strong in this one battle. We'll see about tomorrow.