homesweethomeMrL

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/technology/p/1175761/amazon-inform-prime-members-that-its-bundled-music-benefit-will-introduce-ads-and-drop-o

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1175760/amazon-inform-prime-members-that-its-bundled-music-benefit-will-introduce-ads-and-drop-o

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The losses on any given day come so fast and across such a wide spectrum of civic life that it overwhelms our capacity to mourn. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

. . . Living through the Trump II presidency is an exercise in repeated loss and extended mourning for what is gone — while being daily confronted with the farcical and the absurd.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.radio/post/13640359

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/61199428

In a since-deleted post on X, Ungaro claimed that Melania Trump was one of Epstein's escorts, and that is how she was introduced to her husband, President Donald Trump, the Daily Beast reported. Ungaro shared a WhatsApp recording on X in which she accused her former partner, Paolo Zampolli, one of Trump's appointees to the Kennedy Center's Board of Trustees, of lying about introducing the Trumps in 1998, the report added.

“Let’s tell the public you never were the one introducing Melania to Trump. It was Jeffrey Epstein, as she was [an] escort of Jeffrey Epstein. That’s how she met Donald Trump,” Ungaro said in the recording, posted around 11 p.m. Sunday.

“And I know, because I was with you [for] 20 years and you always told me it was not you—it was Jeffrey Epstein,” she added.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/46592987

For more than 12 years, Nicholas Enrich worked at USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, rising to become one of the agency's top global health officials. Then, in a matter of weeks, he watched as the Trump administration and Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) dismantled the six-decade-old agency responsible for delivering American foreign aid around the world. 

Enrich documented the experience in his book Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss what happened behind the scenes, and its devastating consequences.

This is what Mass Murder looks like.

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Last October, Ron, a 55-year-old construction analyst for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was furloughed for 43 days as the Trump administration took a sledgehammer to federal agencies’ budgets under the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

“We voted for Trump, not realizing that he was going to slam as hard as he did, but it was on day one when he sat down, right after inauguration, and started signing those executive orders and just trashed us federal employees, it was a kick in the teeth,” Ron said.

“If people would just listen and research and do something other than just listen to Fox News, we may all be better off, but it's going to take an open mind and an ability to say, ‘I made a mistake,’ because once you say you made a mistake, you can turn the ship around,” said Chrissey Kelley, 50, a stay-at-home mom.

Speaking out against MAGA cost the Kelleys relationships with friends and family members who support Trump, but in sharing their story, they hope to inspire others having doubts about the GOP. 

“It's okay to be wrong. You made a mistake, it was a bad choice, but it's not the end of the world. We can fix it. We just got to ride it out and hold strong and support each other through it,” Ron said.

. . . Chrissey said she became a Republican as soon as she started voting.

“You were just a conservative. There was no thought behind it. You listen to Fox News, and you listen to conservative outlets, and you're spoon-fed,” Chrissey said.

Ron, who served in the military for 25 years, said the 2008 housing market crash left him “really disillusioned with the Democratic Party.”

When he couldn’t find work in Detroit, he moved to Georgia. He supported Republicans because he associated them with bigger spending on defense.

Ron said he supported Trump with donations, bumper stickers and the “whole nine yards” of MAGA.

“I bought into the lie about the stolen election and all that, and I thought January 6 insurrectionists were actually patriots,” Ron said.

“I just remember being content with thinking that he was what we needed, and he was going to drain the swamp in Washington until he got into office this third term, and realizing that I was dumb as a rock, and I believed everything that I was spoon fed.”

. . . “Just watching the policies of what's happening in our world today unfold one by one by one, I just started drawing up very different conclusions and found out that I was clueless, and most people are today, but now I'm awake and looking at it for what it is, and I cannot believe that he had my support,” Chrissey said.

“It's lie after lie after lie.”

Ron said he now votes for Democrats, and Chrissey said she considers herself an Independent but has voted for Democrats three times now, something she “never thought in my entire life” would happen. 

“The road we're headed down now, if we don't turn this truck around, we're so close to going off the edge of the cliff that we need to stick together,” Ron said.

“We need to put our country back together. It might take decades, but don't give up. We need to be vocal. Stay strong, and follow our laws and Constitution, and hold strong with our values, not the values that the MAGA claims that we have, but the values that we've had in the past 250 years from the founding of the country til Joe Biden's era.”

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