The Big Ugly Bill

[bilby]

...
And if you’ve been silent? Now is the time to speak.

Because soon, this won’t be about politics.
It’ll be about survival.

Knowledge is power. Please share this information and educate fellow Americans.

These are obviously not your words, and is a cut-and-paste from another source. The sudden proliferation of emojis is kind of a dead giveaway. Can you provide a link to this source so we can at least get a headstart on researching the credibility of the source and these claims?

Really?? You're not sure complaints about the MAGGOTY BBB are "credible"?

It is a very good idea to be particularly skeptical of any source that confirms with our precinceptions or biases.

It is also a very good idea to be particularly skeptical of any source that contains emojis.

 

[Elixir]

I totally urge everyone to check out the basis of each claim. Especially the ones with emojis.
The choice of words can be expected to reflect the writer's bias, but the facts alluded to are either facts or not facts.
B#20 has excoriated me for calling reductions in previous allocations for future funding "cuts", because technically the total dollars allocated for those future periods are still greater than this year's allocations, even after the B.U.B. cuts reductions in previous allocations for the future.
I'm sure there will be plenty of this kind of nitpicking and lies based on distortion rather than on outright falsehoods, coming from "both sides". But the text of the B.U.B. is what it is and the harm that it will inevitably wreak upon the commons for the benefit of the donor class/oligarchs, is easily anticipated.

Prove me wrong. Please.

 

[Swammerdami]

...
And if you’ve been silent? Now is the time to speak.

Because soon, this won’t be about politics.
It’ll be about survival.

Knowledge is power. Please share this information and educate fellow Americans.

These are obviously not your words, and is a cut-and-paste from another source. The sudden proliferation of emojis is kind of a dead giveaway. Can you provide a link to this source so we can at least get a headstart on researching the credibility of the source and these claims?

Really?? You're not sure complaints about the MAGGOTY BBB are "credible"?

It is a very good idea to be particularly skeptical of any source that confirms with our precinceptions or biases.

It is also a very good idea to be particularly skeptical of any source that contains emojis.

The complaint was about claims like

WHEN THE STORM HITS & NO ONE COMES
Sec. 80307–80309: Slashes climate resilience + FEMA funds
Hurricanes, floods, and wildfires will leave your town in ruins—and there’ll be no help coming. Just ask North Carolina.

OBVIOUSLY this was prepared as an emotion-laden summary rather than as a submission for peer review.
And it does contain a citation ("Sec. 80307–80309") for sincere worries about the factuality.

Thus the complaint by thebeave, and then bilby, misses the point. The character of BUB and Trumpism more generally should be well known by now. Asking for citation is just a pretense. OF COURSE the emojis raise the chance of a bit of hyperbole, but insisting on citation for Every.Single.Tweet is just silliness, or -- more likely -- deliberate obfuscation.

Similarly, the characters of J.D. Vance and other top MAGGOTS are frequently assailed, often with an emoji as accompaniment. Do you feel the need to insist that a professional psychiatric evaluation accompany each such Tweet?

 

[Swammerdami]

Here are some provisions from B.U.B., copied from prospect.org. (Sorry; I didn't take time to add emojis; you'll have to guess whether I included citations or not.)

Some of the weirdnesses are due to parliamentary rules: Many bill provisions are not eligible for the "reconciliation" exemption to Senate filibuster rules.

Incentivizing SNAP Fraud​

As the Prospect has reported, one of the ways Republicans cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is by forcing states, which have a vastly smaller capacity to tax and borrow, to shoulder more of the program’s cost. But in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski got a two-year exemption from cost-sharing for states with an erroneous payment rate of above 13.3 percent. That includes her home state of Alaska, which has the highest payment error rate in the nation. It was a giveaway for Murkowski in particular. But to comply with budget reconciliation rules, this exemption extends to the states with the ten highest error rates. This is literally incentivizing states to increase waste and fraud in the program. Indeed, in all seriousness, liberal states would be wise to make their SNAP program as sloppy as possible right now.

The Mass Shooter Subsidy​

One of the vanishingly few American gun regulations that still exists is a tax on silencers, which has existed for almost 100 years, and sits at $200—or did until now. Republicans wouldn’t stand for this intolerable burden on America’s large population of hardworking mass shooters, and so they repealed it. They also wanted to remove a requirement that silencers be registered, but that was ruled out of order by the Senate parliamentarian. Still, killing the silencer tax is egregious. Anyone on their way to a workplace or schoolyard to do their part to maintain America’s number one record of gun massacres could already get a fully automatic “bump fire” rifle (thanks to the Supreme Court), but now you won’t even hear them coming.

No Tax on Oil Drillers​

If you listen to Donald Trump’s speeches (good luck to you), you hear a lot about certain modest elements of this bill: no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security. That last one is not in the bill at all—there’s a temporary increase in the standard deduction for people over the age of 65 that is not tied to Social Security at all—but Trump always leaves one of these “no tax” items out: the provision for no tax on oil drillers. As the Prospect has reported, the bill includes an exemption for domestic oil and gas companies from the corporate alternative minimum tax, as long as they have “intangible drilling and development costs.” This is something oil companies lobbied insistently for, and it was inserted by Republican Sen. James Lankford (R-OK); most of the firms that will benefit represent his home state of Oklahoma.

 

[bilby]

...
And if you’ve been silent? Now is the time to speak.

Because soon, this won’t be about politics.
It’ll be about survival.

Knowledge is power. Please share this information and educate fellow Americans.

These are obviously not your words, and is a cut-and-paste from another source. The sudden proliferation of emojis is kind of a dead giveaway. Can you provide a link to this source so we can at least get a headstart on researching the credibility of the source and these claims?

Really?? You're not sure complaints about the MAGGOTY BBB are "credible"?

It is a very good idea to be particularly skeptical of any source that confirms with our precinceptions or biases.

It is also a very good idea to be particularly skeptical of any source that contains emojis.

The complaint was about claims like

WHEN THE STORM HITS & NO ONE COMES
Sec. 80307–80309: Slashes climate resilience + FEMA funds
Hurricanes, floods, and wildfires will leave your town in ruins—and there’ll be no help coming. Just ask North Carolina.

OBVIOUSLY this was prepared as an emotion-laden summary rather than as a submission for peer review.
And it does contain a citation ("Sec. 80307–80309") for sincere worries about the factuality.

Thus the complaint by thebeave, and then bilby, misses the point. The character of BUB and Trumpism more generally should be well known by now. Asking for citation is just a pretense. OF COURSE the emojis raise the chance of a bit of hyperbole, but insisting on citation for Every.Single.Tweet is just silliness, or -- more likely -- deliberate obfuscation.

Similarly, the characters of J.D. Vance and other top MAGGOTS are frequently assailed, often with an emoji as accompaniment. Do you feel the need to insist that a professional psychiatric evaluation accompany each such Tweet?

I.Don't.Look.At.Tweets.

I not only object to their dubious relationship with reality, their use of hyperbole, and their transparent efforts at emotional manipulation; I also object to them being here.

I don't come to IIDB to read tweets. I come here because it's better than going to Twitter.

 

[thebeave]

These are obviously not your words,

Yes, obviously, other than the first parag.
I should have it the rest in a quote block but I don’t like the small print.

and is a cut-and-paste from another source.

Right.

Can you provide a link to this source so we can at least get a headstart on researching the credibility of the source and these claims?

Best I can do is give you the text of the ACTUAL BILL that is referenced There’s a link to the pdf version which should let you search the referenced sections to see if they are represented accurately.

Why can't you provide the source of your cut-and-paste? That doesn't seem too hard to me.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

Most of the worst part don't kick in until after the elections of 26.

I thought there were not going to be elections in 26?

There will be elections. The question is whether they'll be legitimate.

Saddam Hussein used to hold elections in Iraq and routinely got 95%+ of the votes.

Putin won 88% of the votes the last time an election was held in Russia.

If we see Dem strongholds like Washington, Oregon, and California suddenly go red, that'll be the only indicator we'll need.

 

[Elixir]

Why can't you provide the source of your cut-and-paste?

Because I'm not sure where I even saw it.

 

[Elixir]

OBVIOUSLY this was prepared as an emotion-laden summary rather than as a submission for peer review.
And it does contain a citation ("Sec. 80307–80309") for sincere worries about the factuality.

Thus the complaint by thebeave, and then bilby, misses the point. The character of BUB and Trumpism more generally should be well known by now. Asking for citation is just a pretense.

That's my feeling too. Since there's nothing dependent upon the hyperbole or lack thereof in that list that anyone here do about it (emojis are a dead giveaway, of course the whole list is phrased hyperbolically for effect), I don't see how it matters.
If there's an item on the list that looks wrong to you, look it up. I posted it because other sources have addressed almost every single one of those points in exhaustive articles elsewhere. It's not like there's a paucity of information on the devastation in store in the wake of this legislation.

My main question at this point, is how much of this debacle could be un-done if the American electorate woke up and got rid of the fascists? How much could be un-done in 2027 if the Dems got the House (which I doubt) or the House and the Senate (which I doubt even more)? Assuming the Trump junta remains in force through 2028, how much could be undone by a Dem president with or without Congress in 2029?

IMHO it's a bleak picture in any of those scenarios, unless there's a major upheaval within the fascist Party that can weaken it sufficiently to allow sanity back into the picture. The fascists have full control of the levers of power and are not going to relinquish that control just because some law says they're supposed to, or because a lot of people voted for another Party. They will use those levers of power to perpetuate their own regime, no matter what, even if means that the Commander in Chief orders the military to find and kill every opposition politician, and place every "blue" State under federal Martial law.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Mass Shooter Subsidy​

One of the vanishingly few American gun regulations that still exists is a tax on silencers, which has existed for almost 100 years, and sits at $200—or did until now. Republicans wouldn’t stand for this intolerable burden on America’s large population of hardworking mass shooters, and so they repealed it. They also wanted to remove a requirement that silencers be registered, but that was ruled out of order by the Senate parliamentarian. Still, killing the silencer tax is egregious. Anyone on their way to a workplace or schoolyard to do their part to maintain America’s number one record of gun massacres could already get a fully automatic “bump fire” rifle (thanks to the Supreme Court), but now you won’t even hear them coming.

Sorry, but this is entirely reasonable. Silencers are not like Hollywood, they simply reduce the volume below the threshold for hearing damage. There's no reason for any restriction on them. There are other parts of the world where being able to own a gun also means being able to own a silencer and it doesn't cause a problem.

 

[RVonse]

Most of the worst part don't kick in until after the elections of 26.

I thought there were not going to be elections in 26?

There will be elections. The question is whether they'll be legitimate.

Saddam Hussein used to hold elections in Iraq and routinely got 95%+ of the votes.

Putin won 88% of the votes the last time an election was held in Russia.

If we see Dem strongholds like Washington, Oregon, and California suddenly go red, that'll be the only indicator we'll need.

While I totally agree with you. Most of the Democrats certainly did not believe in obvious indicators which were noticed by the Jan 6 crowd during the 2020 POTUS election.

Those protesters learned the hard way that the only thing that counts is what can be proven. And you can't prove anything unless politically driven courts give you standing to present evidence and due process.

You would think that both sides would want better election integrity but in practice....only when it benefits their ideology.

 

[RVonse]

As an aside, hopefully this bill once and for all destroys and annihilates the meme that republicans are prudent financial manages carefully protecting our financial future by reducing the deficit! Sorry for that long-tortured sentence, but I've been hearing that BS for 40 years.

I totally agree with Musk. We don't have a Democrat or Republican party, we have one big uniparty called the "Porky Pig Party".

 

[Swammerdami]

I don't come to IIDB to read tweets. I come here because it's better than going to Twitter.

The "paragraphs" in question had tweet-like texture and syntax -- (if I may coin and then misuse the word "tweet-like") -- and yet you did read them when you came. Why?

- - - - - - - - - - - -

As an aside, hopefully this bill once and for all destroys and annihilates the meme that republicans are prudent financial manages carefully protecting our financial future by reducing the deficit! Sorry for that long-tortured sentence, but I've been hearing that BS for 40 years.

I totally agree with Musk. We don't have a Democrat or Republican party, we have one big uniparty called the "Porky Pig Party".

OMG. You are incorrigible. Zero Democrats voted for The B.U.B. Any of them could have gone to the White House, licked the Holy Taint, and offered to defect in return for payola, letting the MAGGOTs brag about B.U.B. having bipartisan support. Lisa Murkowski is proud that she betrayed America to get oodles of Porky Pig meat for Alaska, but no Democrat took a similar opportunity. Zero. With a Z.

Are you still giving Gingrich credit for the surpluses in the late 1990's? Are you still standing by your implicit claim that DOGE laying off 31% of IRS auditors was an effective and sincere way to save government money?

Incorrigible. With an I.

 

[Swammerdami]

Why can't you provide the source of your cut-and-paste?

Because I'm not sure where I even saw it.

I simply copy/paste/Google an excerpt to locate webpage(s) for a quote. That's one reason I often omit the source of a quote -- anyone who sincerely wants a source can find it. We are all Google users here.

I Googled 1 or 2 of the sentences in OP and got some hits at Facebook groups; I linked to one of those groups in my first post in this thread. Millions of ordinary Americans converse on Facebook rather than on message-boards or X. The group seemed to be a venue primarily for ordinary Americans rather than elite commentators.

Finding that "grass-roots" group gave me hope! Judges, Senators, corporate executives are increasingly afraid to defy the fascists. Maybe -- just maybe -- ordinary Americans will be our salvation.

 

[TV and credit cards]

As an aside, hopefully this bill once and for all destroys and annihilates the meme that republicans are prudent financial manages carefully protecting our financial future by reducing the deficit! Sorry for that long-tortured sentence, but I've been hearing that BS for 40 years.

I totally agree with Musk. We don't have a Democrat or Republican party, we have one big uniparty called the "Porky Pig Party".

I tend to agree with this in principle. The worst the wealthy can expect under the Democrats is to break even. To have the status quo left behind by the Republicans maintained. Neither party is ever going to take a serious financial bite out of their ass. Not that I believe it would happen under a Musk directed political party. Musk seems to be the natural next step in the political progression after Trump co-opted fear and ignorance, that the wealthy class take over and we drop any pretense that the masses are on an equal footing. Surely they are not going to leave a prize like the United States to a progression of Trumplike creatures.

 

[bilby]

I don't come to IIDB to read tweets. I come here because it's better than going to Twitter.

The "paragraphs" in question had tweet-like texture and syntax -- (if I may coin and then misuse the word "tweet-like")

Yes. Which is why I objected to them, despite not bothering to read past the first couple.

-- and yet you did read them when you came.

This assumption is incorrect...

Why?

...and I need not explain why I did something that I only did in your imagination.

Though, to be honest, I wouldn't owe you an explanation, even if I had acted as you imagined I must.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Why can't you provide the source of your cut-and-paste?

Because I'm not sure where I even saw it.

I simply copy/paste/Google an excerpt to locate webpage(s) for a quote. That's one reason I often omit the source of a quote -- anyone who sincerely wants a source can find it. We are all Google users here.

I Googled 1 or 2 of the sentences in OP and got some hits at Facebook groups; I linked to one of those groups in my first post in this thread. Millions of ordinary Americans converse on Facebook rather than on message-boards or X. The group seemed to be a venue primarily for ordinary Americans rather than elite commentators.

Finding that "grass-roots" group gave me hope! Judges, Senators, corporate executives are increasingly afraid to defy the fascists. Maybe -- just maybe -- ordinary Americans will be our salvation.

In my limited experience, so far ChatGPT seems a cut above Google AI. With regards to its use of social media for information, it did at least look for credible originating source.
"How does AI discern truth from fiction when gathering information, particularly from social media?"

 

[bilby]

I simply copy/paste/Google an excerpt to locate webpage(s) for a quote.

That approach has become annoyingly ineffective, since Google decided to abandon returning links to web pages that contain the search text, in favour of returning AI bullshit, spun up using the text as a prompt, rather than as a search term.

It used to be reliable, but now one is very lucky to get a useful result, particularly when the search string is more than a handful of words.

 

[bilby]

The group seemed to be a venue primarily for ordinary Americans rather than elite commentators.

Yeah, astroturfing is endemic, particularly on Facebook. It was doubtless intended to seem to be that. Whether it actually was that is a mystery nobody can penetrate.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Most of the worst part don't kick in until after the elections of 26.

I thought there were not going to be elections in 26?

There will be elections. The question is whether they'll be legitimate.

Saddam Hussein used to hold elections in Iraq and routinely got 95%+ of the votes.

Putin won 88% of the votes the last time an election was held in Russia.

If we see Dem strongholds like Washington, Oregon, and California suddenly go red, that'll be the only indicator we'll need.

While I totally agree with you. Most of the Democrats certainly did not believe in obvious indicators which were noticed by the Jan 6 crowd during the 2020 POTUS election.

Those protesters learned the hard way that the only thing that counts is what can be proven. And you can't prove anything unless politically driven courts give you standing to present evidence and due process.

You would think that both sides would want better election integrity but in practice....only when it benefits their ideology.

Fuck this misinformation. Trump took zero fraud claims to court. You can not blame the courts for something they were never asked to adjudicate.