Yes, in its own awful way, Senate Democrats' compromising with republicans is a win...

Greetings, fellow truth seekers and freedom fighters!

It's taken me some time to sit down and write today's entry because life has been hectic lately, but I've been wanting to share a few thoughts regarding Senate Democrats' actions and the republican epstein government shutdown.

The TL;DR: I'm feeling conflicted. 

My first thought is for my dearest friend in all the world who works for a small business, who is also self-employed, and who thus is on Obamacare.

I've been worried about them from the minute maga mike tiny johnson mentioned lusting to cut Obamacare tax credits: how on earth is this precious person going to be able to afford their insurance? Or their ongoing medical treatments? Appointments? Prescriptions? Let's say you still can afford your premiums after the republican tax hike: what good is that if you can't afford to use the doctors and medications that those premiums offer?

I haven't asked them how it's going. I'm almost afraid to. I can honestly say that this is something I lose sleep over because my friend is in good shape compared to most Americans--they own their own home outright and are brilliant at managing their money. Like, they're an inspiration to me. So I'm hoping they're going to be ok, but I don't know for sure, and I do know that this republican fuckery is going to pinch at best.

And what about the rest of the 6% of Americans on the ACA? How many will get priced straight out of healthcare?

All of this only goes to show how pervertedly the entire republican party gets off on harming and outright killing innocent, hardworking Americans.

The cruelty IS the point.

trump and the republicans' replacement for Obamacare is for Americans, no matter how young or old, to work til they drop and to die if they get sick--preferably suffering as much as possible along the way.

So republicans gave Democrats the Sophie's choice of starving innocent, hardworking Americans to death by withholding SNAP benefits or killing innocent, hardworking Americans outright by denying them life-saving healthcare.

I guess that starvation is also part of the republican replacement for Obamacare: work til you starve to death so that you die from starvation before you ever get sick enough to need healthcare.

Sounds about right to me (those fucking rich fascists--let them live for one year each exactly the way they want the rest of us to live; then we can talk. Til then, they can go to hell).

So I'm anguished by what republicans are deliberately doing to harm, starve, and murder innocent, hardworking Americans by obstructing the entire government, not to mention the justice system, by hiding the trump-epstein files to appease the orange pedophile-felon-rapist-fraud-cheat-traitor in the White House. 

It's disgusting.

According to Mark Epstein, donald trump is so criminally deplorable that, eventually, not even jeffrey epstein could stand him.

Let that sink in.

But I digress.

My sense is that the blue tsunami we celebrated last week gave the Democrats in congress enough momentum to hold out for keeping the ACA tax benefits in place as a condition for reopening the government.

So my initial reaction to chuck schumer's behavior was rage, consternation, betrayal, and disgust--it felt like an unexpected gut punch, like Democrats were Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football yet again.

I mean, we all know that republicans do NOT keep their promises. We all know that they do NOT act in good faith. We all know that they are ALL as traitorous, criminal, lawless, and rapey as their precious orange god-king trump. 

It felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the country.

But also...

Although we all know that republican cruelty is at the heart of every iota of America's current shutdown suffering, messaging can't buy insulin. People on the ACA would surely suffer, but at least reopening the government would get us one step closer to getting supplemental nutrition benefits back online. At least, hopefully sooner rather than later, the most disadvantaged among us would be able to at least get some food. 

So that felt like a lifeline.

Thin and feeble, yes, but a lifeline.

And another win that I see is more political than immediate: every fucker that sided with republicans WILL get primaried and then ousted, just like creepy crooked cuomo. 

AOC, Crockett, Mamdani, and others like them are the future of the Democratic party.

We're watching in real time as power drains out of the government and into OUR hands.

Since they refuse to represent us, we ARE showing them the door and replacing them with representatives who truly serve OUR best interests.

If they won't help us, we WILL help ourselves as a nation.

It sucks that our government caters to aipac, corporations, and the rich--with republicans also actively and gleefully serving criminals, fascists, and our enemies instead of us--but the American people are strong.

We refuse to give up.

We're fighting for our country, our democracy, our rights, and our wellbeing as a nation and as individuals of every class.

We are the ones we've been waiting for--we are our own saviors.

We've got this!

Once my initial rage subsided enough for me to have the patience to watch a little news, I caught a couple Lawrence O'Donnell clips that I found interesting enough to share here.

His take: the minority party never wins during a shutdown--the best they can ever do is secure a compromise. If they're good, they lose only a little ground. If they're brilliant, they actually gain a little ground. And nobody can ever really tell how a shutdown is going to resolve or what any individual in either party will actually do--hence, being a party leader who actually leads in the House or Senate is the devil's own job, especially with the relatively recent addition of all the budget and shutdown complications that leaders of generations past never even conceived of, let alone ever had to manage.

In other words, Lawrence says, once the government shuts down, what follows is anyone's guess. And if you're convinced one way or the other what the outcome will be, get over yourself because not even career veterans know for sure what will actually happen. 

So--despite republicans' known inability to honor their promises--Lawrence considers Senate Democrats' compromise to reopen the government to be a win.

Five of the Dems who voted with republicans started their negotiations with them the very first day of the shutdown. 

The agreement they reached converted the vast majority of the republican caucus to vote with these Democrats to increase SNAP spending. 

So, it wasn't a handful of Democrats who flipped--it was the bulk of the republicans! And they flipped to pay Americans more for SNAP!

And the messaging is still there: republicans held the American people hostage--"Your food or your healthcare"--to protect pedophiles, including the trafficker in the White House.

As Cult College on YouTube says, republicans are truly in a no-win situation, and they know it: "trump is f*cked."

GOOD.

Speaking of trump being f*cked, more good news on that front came out today (bad news for trump is good news for America!): some smoking-gun epstein e-mails surfaced today that again prove that maxwell and trump have been lying to the American people and that both's involvement in epstein's child sex predation and trafficking is (duh!) more insidious and far less innocent than they've been pretending (double duh!). I'll be back to post more on that soon, so watch this space.

- Dot Calm's shadow