Forty-two million Americans (and MAGA) are about to lose SNAP benefits. Just before Thanksgiving. Lovely. This is the result of the Republican shut-down. The cons are SO intent on taking health insurance from millions of Americans (and MAGA), they’re willing to also starve millions MORE Americans (and MAGA) to make the point.

Sadly, I think the cons are about to “win.” The end of this week ends the month. November 1st is the date the new Affordable Care Act rates are locked in with open enrollment, though they actually kick in January 1st, 2026. All the cons have to do is ignore the needs of the people for a few more days and the fight becomes moot. Health insurance rates skyrocket and millions fall off the insured rolls. Having a nation of ailing and sick people with no access to health care probably won’t be too much of a problem, right?

I find myself shaking my head at this crowd on a regular basis, but it’s not the unbelievable insolence of their actions that causes it. It’s the effing cruelty that has me shaking my head…

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Apparently, Donny is very upset that the Democrats are trying to do to the Republicans what the Republicans are trying to do to the Democrats. All of this gerrymandering stuff is creating real trouble around the country. California’s Prop 50 looks strong. Virginia is working a loophole that might allow them to remove three Republican seats.

In a late night social media post, 47 wrote, “Look what happened to our Country when a Crooked Moron became our “President!” Yeah, Donny, we’ve all noticed. Americans wish you weren’t there, too. He’s sending “election observers” to California to oversee the Prop 50 special election coming up. They’ve already written up their “discoveries” of “irregularities.” They want to get ahead of the “problems” they make up.

I’ve been writing about the fall of a once-great nation. It’s pretty clear, it’s all coming down to the 2026 mid-terms. If Americans win, there’s an outside chance to rein in the insanity. If MAGA wins? The insanity gets steroids…

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Yesterday, I said I expect our once-great nation to devolve into smaller, separate countries. I hope for a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. This is in response to the fall of the United States and the abdication of the Constitution. If I may paraphrase evil Ronald Reagan, I didn’t leave the United States of America. The United States of America left me.

I’d call one of the new nations ‘The Republic of California.’ (Guess where I think it will be.) It’s government would be a Constitutional Republic, based on an updated and corrected version of the same US Constitution MAGA just abandoned. I happen to have created just such a document for just such a time. My updated Constitution addresses some of the inherent failings of the original document.

The economy of my proposed new nation would be Social Capitalism.
“Social Capitalism? Never heard of it.”
Right. Social Capitalism is really just Democratic Socialism. The thing is, I’ve learned through the oh-so-many years of my life, that a group – any group – has to wait for it’s slowest member. It’s a kind of a curse but that’s the way it is.

Americans have been conditioned to crap their collective panties every time they hear the word ‘Socialism,’ despite the fact that we ALL benefit from the few areas we’ve dabbled in it. It MUST, we were told, equate to “Communism.” It turns out? Not so much. Socialism is a continuum. At one extreme is the United States’ current system, brutal, so-called “Free Market” Capitalism, and at the other extreme is Communism. Neither system best serves the largest number of people.

In simplest terms, Social Capitalism is regulated capitalism for private industry, with public control and ownership of the commons. It features high taxes on high incomes.
“High taxes on high incomes is income redistribution!”
“Yes, it is. In fact, EVERY financial transaction is ‘income redistribution,’ so you’re not saying anything. Like, remember when the boss kept all of the revenues generated by the workers? THAT was income redistribution, too. You did the work, the boss “redistributed” the result to himself. Why aren’t you bitching about that?”

I’ve always thought ‘Democratic Socialism’ was a stupid name, almost a taunt, intended to ridicule those who can’t think beyond what they’re told. I developed Social Capitalism independently – then discovered it already existed, it was clearly better than alternatives (as I had suspected), and it already had a name. It was a dumb name, but a name, nonetheless.

But the key phrase is, “Americans have been conditioned to crap their collective panties every time they hear the word ‘Socialism.'” The moment some of our slowest members hear ‘Democratic Socialism,’ they lock up. “I ain’t no DemocRAT!”
“No, it refers to the process, not the party.”
“I ain’t no Commie, either.”
“No, it’s not Communism. It’s sociali– Oh, never mind. Let’s do Social Capitalism, instead!”
“Yeah, Capitalism. That’s for me.”

I’m not even the first to THAT particular revelation, either – that some people need a more comforting name for a thing because they’re just not able to quickly update their thinking. When FDR was sprinkling elements of Democratic Socialism into the American economy – the elements that created the greatest middle class in history – he, too, knew it needed a more palatable name for Americans. He called it ‘The New Deal.’ It was The New Deal that made America great in the first place…

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The violations and outrages just keep coming, don’t they? It’s distraction mode, turbocharged. It’s like he doesn’t want us thinking about certain things. I don’t get it. Oh, is NOW a good time to remember that Donald Trump was best friends with an accused and convicted child sex trafficker named Jeffrey Epstein for fifteen years? Is NOW the time to recall that much of this noise is about burying the Epstein story by simply overwhelming it with fresh, new outrages? When it comes to 9/11 we say, “Never forget.” I think we owe the same to those girls who Donny and his friends so violently attacked…