#down with the gop

[donbartinelli]

American people: “guns are the number one killer of children in the US and school shootings are at all all time high.”

GOP: “we hear you!”

American people: “ok so what are you going to do about it? Gun control legislation? Banning assault weapons?”

GOP: “nah that would infringe on our personal freedoms to get paid by the gun lobby—I mean right to bear arms.”

American People: “so what are you going you do about it?”

GOP: “I know! Let’s ban drag queens and go after trans kids! That’ll protect your children!”

#it’s not about protecting your kids #it’s about control #and money #drag #trans ftm #queer #lgbtqia #trans #lgbt #queer as hell #transmasc #ftm #drag queen #drag queens #trans rights #trans rights are human rights #down with the gop #fascisim

[zacharialend]

#lies #lying liars who lie #america #down with the GOP

[sher-ee]

#arizona #gop #abortion rights #womens health #body autonomy #they will take everything from you #the handmaids tale #remember #sit the fuck down #womens rights #vote blue #vote in November #vote democrat #biden 2024 #biden harris 2024 #fuck the gop #donald trump #roe v wade

[nando161mando]

#trickle down economics #piñata economics #fyi #psa #class war #classwar #capitalism #anti capitalist #capitalist hell #capitalist dystopia #capitalist bullshit #eat the rich #eat the fucking rich #fuck the gop #fuck the police #fuck the supreme court #fuck the patriarchy #ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #neoliberal capitalism #fuck neoliberals #anthony albanese #albanese government #antiauthoritarian #antinazi #anti capitalism

[animentality]

my friend: so Anakin Skywalker literally admitted to supporting a fascist dictatorship to a SENATOR who works in a democratic republic, and then she gets in bed with him??? how??

me: she's a Democrat :)

#star wars #anakin skywalker #padme amidala #us politics #gop #democracy #democratic party #its what they do best really #lie down

[thetrekkiehasthephonebox]

I just think that if your work is getting scraped, you should be paid. Not the host website. The actual creator of the work.

If you cover a song and you try to sell that cover, you still have to pay the original songwriter their mechanical royalty. Sure, the publisher will take a cut for doing the administrative work but the writer still gets theirs too.

You can't have it both ways. It can't be art on one side of the transaction and then not be art on the other. You don't get to only use copyright law as protection to benefit corporations, and then turn around and demand it not benefit the artists making the works.

And honestly? Do you really think the AI bubble could withstand needing to actually compensate the artists that've been ripped off and rehashed? I don't.

#honestly I think statutory royalties might be the way to shut them down forever #oh no! now you have to pay people money for their work! #I know tumblr likes to treat copyright law like it's the boogeyman sometimes #but as far as legislation goes the 1976 act was actually pretty amazing for artists #like copyright reversion??? #do you understand how fucking amazing that is? #not like congress will actually do anything because the GOP is committed to being useless to prove government is useless #but uh #maybe #anti ai

[sordidamok]

The story above this in my news feed was about cops murdering a 15-year old girl who was doing what they told her to do. But Trump can post pictures of Biden as a murder victim and threaten a judge's daughter.

#trump is a criminal #vote blue #vote democrat #democrats #democracy #social democracy #vote biden #vote blue to save democracy #vote blue 2024 #democratic socialism #democrats now socialism later #vote biden/harris #biden/harris 2024 #vote blue to save america #both sides are not the same #vote democratic #vote blue all the way down the ticket #end the gop

[odinsblog]

What do Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ted Cruz, Tim Scott and Mike Pence have in common? They like to call themselves “alpha males” but none of them had the balls to stand up to the guy who verbally abused and relentlessly mocked them

#politics #lol #republicans #ron desantis #cowards #never back down #how you gonna call yourself an alpha male but scared of trump? #i think she is a piece of shit too but if they really wanted to #stick it to trump they woulda endorsed nikki haley #the gop is a bunch of cowards #new hampshire primaries #never back down my black ass

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Today, President Joe Biden signed the continuing resolution that will give lawmakers another week to finalize appropriations bills. Lawmakers will continue to hash out the legislation that will fund the government. 

Republicans have been stalling the appropriations bills for months. In addition to inserting their own extremist cultural demands in the measures, they have demanded budget cuts to address the fact that the government spends far more money than it brings in. 

As soon as Mike Johnson (R-LA) became House speaker, he called for a “debt commission” to address the growing budget deficit. This struck fear into the hearts of those eager to protect Social Security and Medicare, because when Johnson chaired the far-right Republican Study Committee in 2020, it called for cutting those popular programs by raising the age of eligibility, lowering cost-of-living adjustments, and reducing benefits for retirees whose annual income is higher than $85,000. Lawmakers don’t want to take on such unpopular proposals, so setting up a commission might be a workaround.

Last month, the House Budget Committee advanced legislation that would create such a commission. The chair of the House Budget Committee, Jodey C. Arrington (R-TX), told reporters that Speaker Johnson was “100% committed to this commission” and wanted to attach it to the final appropriations legislation for fiscal year 2024, the laws currently being hammered out.

Congress has not yet agreed to this proposed commission, and a recent Data for Progress poll showed that 70% of voters reject the idea of it. 

This week, a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a nonprofit think tank that focuses on tax policy, suggested that the cost of tax cuts should be factored into any discussions about the budget deficit. 

In 2017 the Trump tax cuts slashed the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and reined in taxation for foreign profits. The ITEP report looked at the first five years the law was in effect. It concluded that in that time, most profitable corporations paid “considerably less” than 21% because of loopholes and special breaks the law either left in place or introduced. 

From 2018 through 2022, 342 companies in the study paid an average effective income tax rate of just 14.1%. Nearly a quarter of those companies—87 of them—paid effective tax rates of under 10%. Fifty-five of them (16% of the 342 companies), including T-Mobile, DISH Network, Netflix, General Motors, AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, FedEx, Molson Coors, and Nike, paid effective tax rates of less than 5%.

Twenty-three corporations, all of them profitable, paid no federal tax over the five year period. One hundred and nine corporations paid no federal tax in at least one of the five years. 

The Guardian’s Adam Lowenstein noted yesterday that several corporations that paid the lowest taxes are steered by chief executive officers who are leading advocates of “stakeholder capitalism.” This concept revises the idea that corporations should focus on the best interests of their shareholders to argue that corporations must also take care of the workers, suppliers, consumers, and communities affected by the corporation. 

The idea that corporate leaders should take responsibility for the community rather than paying taxes to the government so the community can take care of itself is eerily reminiscent of the argument of late-nineteenth-century industrialists. 

When Republicans invented national taxation to meet the extraordinary needs of the Civil War, they immediately instituted a progressive federal income tax because, as Representative Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) said, “The weight [of taxation] must be distributed equally, not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.” 

But the wartime income tax expired in 1872, and the rise of industry made a few men spectacularly wealthy. Quickly, those men came to believe they, rather than the government, should direct the country’s development. 

In June 1889, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie published what became known as the “Gospel of Wealth” in the popular magazine North American Review. Carnegie explained that “great inequality…[and]...the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few” were “not only beneficial, but essential to…future progress.” And, Carnegie asked, “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?”

Rather than paying higher wages or contributing to a social safety net—which would “encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy,” Carnegie wrote—the man of fortune should “consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer…in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”  

“[T]his wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if distributed in small sums to the people themselves,” Carnegie wrote. “Even the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among themselves in trifling amounts through the course of many years.”

Here in the present, Republicans want to extend the Trump tax cuts after their scheduled end in 2025, a plan that would cost $4 trillion over a decade even without the deeper cuts to the corporate tax rate Trump has called for if he is reelected. Biden has called for preserving the 2017 tax cuts only for those who make less than $400,000 a year and permitting the rest to expire. He has also called for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, which would generate more than $2 trillion. 

Losing the revenue part of the budget equation and focusing only on spending cuts seems to reflect a society like the one the late-nineteenth-century industrialists embraced, in which a few wealthy leaders get to decide how to direct the nation’s wealth.   

[LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN: MARCH 1, 2024]

Heather Cox Richardson

+

“The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock.” —Margaret Halsey, novelist (13 Feb 1910-1997)

#poverty #trickle down economics #corrupt GOP #Letters From An American #heather cox richardson #ecoomy #wealth #“debt commission” #corporations #Margaret Halsey #government for the people

[emperornorton47]

#trickle down economics #economics #Class destruction #republicans #gop

[allhailthe70shousewife]

@archivist-goldfish Here it is:

And if you want to keep an eye on new replies…

Qrazy.

#gqp #gop #republicans #trump #MAGA #southern strategy #us history #taylor swift #swifties #HEY SWIFTIES GO AFTER TRUMP AND MAGA AND TAKE THEM DOWN

[dhaaruni]

The target audience of a fundraiser hosted by Hillary Clinton and Lin-Manuel Miranda is rich liberals who think both Mitt Romney's 47% comment AND Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" comment are objectively correct so unless you're in that group, calm the fuck down.

#nobody else can afford the tickets lol #Personal #politics #all the Marxists are melting down over it and I'm like #they're trying to raise boatloads of cash to drown out the GOP electoral advantage #Hillary's a monster fundraiser so let her cook

[sher-ee]

#donald trump #maga lies #maga bs #it never ends #gop #Republicans #ron filipkowski #politics #election fraud #suckers #flyer #vote blue #vote democrat #blue all the way down

[nando161mando]

Australia’s PM demands ‘full accountability’ over death of Gaza aid worker, yet Albanese has funded israels genocide of palestinians, what a fucking hypocrite!

#ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #israel #israhell #palestine #fuck neoliberals #neoliberal capitalism #anthony albanese #albanese government #bigot #republican hypocrisy #liberal hypocrisy #hypocrite #gop hypocrisy #zionistterror #zionazis #zionistcensorship #elbit systems #shut elbit down #hypocrites #free palestine #freepalastine🇵🇸 #free gaza #gaza #gaza strip #gaza genocide

[the-fallen-blue]

We, as a queer community, really need to get better at teaching our history to our youngest members. Because you cannot go forward without knowing where you have been, because you cannot know what you have if you don't know what it cost, and because I never want to see another damn fic where a character who lived through the 80s and 90s in the military acts like Don't Ask, Don't Tell was some cruel oppressive assault on their rights that they hate and resent their superiors for.

#yes this is an arson murder and jaywalking joke but it really is genuinely distracting #for those who don't know: DADT was a -protection- #it did not -suddenly- make queer folk unwelcome in the military #queer folk were ALREADY not welcome in the military #and in fact we were so unwelcome that it was official policy to hunt us down and drum us out #DADT said 'you're still unwelcome obviously but only if you force the issue' #'we'll look the other way if you're discreet' #like yes that's still shitty and that's why we celebrated when it was repealed #but only because it -also- came with the repeal of the -underlying policy- #many queer folk were certainly upset that it didn't go far enough but no one with half a brain #thought it was an -attack- on us. it was the exact opposite #a halfway gesture of allyship from a democratic party that couldn't get anything better past the congressional GOP #so now you know. #go forth and write Carol Danvers with greater period accuracy.

[tomorrowusa]

Meatball Ron kissed Trump’s ring in record time

If you are interested in picking up any "Never Back Down" merch, for future ironic use, there will never be a better time to get it dirt cheap!

Not sure what he'll do with his Iowa Never Back Down bus.

Maybe he'll repurpose it to transport migrants to Iowa so they can help with his 2028 campaign.

#ron desantis #gop presidential nomination #desantis backs down #never back down #meatball ron #don't say gay #ron goes to mar-a-lago to kiss the ring of trump #the most hapless presidential candidate in modern history #election 2024