The Republicans are absolutely committed to the lie that the shutdown is because the Democrats are demanding the government pay for illegal aliens’ health care. It doesn’t matter how many times they get corrected; they’ll just keep repeating it.

It’s an interesting experiment in just how brazen a lie they’ll be able to get away with. I’m hoping this is the one that finally breaks them, and they lose credibility for good, but the right-wing media bubble is sewn up pretty tight, and so far it seems they’ll believe pretty much anything they’re fed.

This is a hideous mis-meme-ing of the original XKCD comic. The tiny pillar is supposed to represent something we all actually need – since we have built so much on top of it – but barely think about. Like curl or ffmpeg.

Trump and Hegseth are not the sharpest tools in the shed, for sure, but they’re also not the ones really making decisions. Stephen Miller is possibly in charge? JD Vance’s vassalage to dystopian surveillance tech titan Peter Thiel is another influence channel.

At least when I’m cleaning up after shit devs who used Stack Overflow, I can usually search using a fragment of their code and find where they swiped it from and get some clue what the hell they were thinking. Now that they’re all using AI chatbots, there’s no trace.

I’m convinced that the real purpose of this meeting was to gauge the willingness of top military officers to support a coup. I would be surprised if their private conversations in response to this spectacle were not spied on.

Fortunately, at least in public appearance, they don’t seem thrilled with this administration.