Watching it happen from over here in slowly mounting horror.
 

I do disagree.  I believe that the orders given to the military to take the COVID vaccine were legal, and were required to ensure that the ranks of the military were not decimated by this terrible contagious disease. Any enlisted person who refused the vaccine refused a legitimate order from his or her commanding officer - at a time when the country was at war, no less - and deserved discharge.  George Washington required his soldiers to take the small pox vaccine, why should any contemporary solider be able to refuse to take the COVID vaccine? I mean, all of them were vaccinated against many pernicious diseases while they were in the service.  The only difference between the COVID vaccine and a tetanus shot is the politicization of COVID under trump.  And we can see the consequences of the anti-vax movement with the measles epidemic in Texas, in which at least one child has died from a disease that the medical establishment thought had been completely eradicated with vaccines years ago. Did you read about what happened in Samoa when RFK jr did his anti-vax thing there? A measles outbreak that killed a lot of children.  Vaccines save lives. 

The federal government may well have more employees than are needed, but this wholesale dismissal of entire agencies serves no legitimate purpose.  The National Parks will not be sufficiently staffed to open the parks to the public, or clean the bathrooms, or ensure the wildlife doesn't eat the tourists, this summer.  The CFPB returned millions of dollars to defrauded consumers, but all of its employees are now on administrative leave, locked out of their computers and unable to do their work.   USAID saved millions of lives, but has effectively been shut down.  Musk fired people who are essential to safe operations at  the FAA and the Department of Energy, and is desperately trying to rehire them, having realized he was a bit hasty.  Veterans make up the largest contingent of federal employees.  So with Musk in charge (did you vote for Musk? I didn’t), thousands and thousands of vets are losing their jobs, without cause. The ongoing threats to demolish Medicaid, Medicare and social security is so trump can give tax cuts to billionaires like Musk, Bezos and Thiel, to the extreme detriment of the common people of this country, in which group I am included. I am on Medicare, and my children are on Medicaid, and I hope in a few months to obtain social security benefits, for which I worked hard for 45 years.  But the GOP wants to end all this.  And the VA is also seeing mass firings - you rely on the VA for at least some of your medical care, do you not?  You are likely to experience some negative effects on your ability to receive health care in the coming months and years because there just won’t be the staff at the VA to serve the needs of all the veterans.

Pardoning the violent criminals who stormed the Capital on January 6, who defecated in its halls and who brutalized the police officers in their way, is just a foretaste of what trump will do to the rule of law. He intends to use the DOJ and the FBI to punish his political enemies.  That’s what tyrants like Putin and Assad do. No US president has ever even threatened these things before, let alone actually done them. But trump will. And no US president has ever embraced foreign dictators, or threatened to take the US out of NATO, or threatened our close allies, or threatened to invade Canada, or proposed turning Gaza into a beach front resort to be developed by his son in law, or to seize Greenland, or to rename the Gulf of Mexico.  

And the kicker, the final straw, in some ways the worst of the worst, is the obscene effort by trump and Vance to humiliate Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.  What shame.  

The lies, the corruption, the ugly creep of authoritarianism that this so called administration brings will deny to us all the freedoms and liberty you purport to embrace, Joe. Unless you are really really rich, you are going to suffer in this new regime sooner or later. The government which was established to serve the people is being redirected to serve only the billionaires.  

The US is politically polarized, and it’s not going to be resolved on this board. I don’t see the value of debate on political matters here - there are plenty of other domains for that, and here we share a common love of reading and of CJC’s books. That is not to deny anyone’s arguments or views. I think we either bond over what we share and leave the rest for elsewhere, or we invite the heated differences in our society to do its thing here too.