Low-Rent Lindsay

A Birthday Ballad for the Republic 🎂

Jul 05, 2025

Well, USA, you had a pretty good run.

Either we overthrow a king every 249 years (and we get off our collective asses a little more effectively RIGHT NOW OR NEVER), or we really just don’t, and we accept this Orbanization of what was pretty much the best darn tootin’ piece of home until 74 million people broke my heart (and a bunch more stayed home) on November 5, 2024.

And the hell that hath been wrought since January 20, 2025? Worse than I imagined. So much for me being a sky-is-falling snowflake.

No, I haven't really PERSONALLY felt the true kick in the gut from this YET—other than watching the unraveling of whatever fragile threads were left holding together this experiment of a country:

Basic decency
Functioning institutions
The ability to travel abroad at will without being ridiculed
The ability to return home without worrying that my little website might get me sent to the El Salvador Gulag or Alligator Auschwitz (if my 6 MPH over the speed limit doesn't get me sent there first—without due process, we are ALL 6 MPH over the limit away from this—TRUE STORY).

I'm nostalgic for the 54+ years during which my government was not actively trying to kill me.

Next up: I update 40 continuing education courses for CPAs and Enrolled Agents.

So, yeah, I've read the bill. I've tracked it. Since this is very probably the last job I'll ever have, I kinda need to keep it. So I can't go writing stuff down that just ain't so and expect the customers to be like "cool" (these are customers who write in when my rounding in a review question answer choice is different from THEIR rounding).

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Yes, its original name, because we have allowed the government to be over-run by people with all the sophistication, class, and restraint of adolescent boys who can't get laid and think they should be getting lots of laid.

I'll just mention the little problem we will mostly all feel (due to the gutting of Medicaid and stuff).

Yeah, most of us aren't on Medicaid.

(Dear Doh!klahomans: Soonercare = Medicaid)

But you know who benefits from Medicaid?

All those kids we're gonna need to grow up enough to pick all the fruit rotting in the fields since all the brown people were kicked out.
Aunt Doris and Uncle Ed in the nursing home.

Even if their families can scrape together the resources to keep from having to provide care they just are not equipped to do well (at the same time they have their own lives, jobs, and kids soon to be unemployed with layoffs due to shitter economy + A.I.), lots of facilities are going to close.

But whatever.

I'm just trying not to be despondent.

So here's a video.

Why was all this money taken?

To fund ICE.

They blew through their annual budget by last month, and now they've been handed a budget BIGGER THAN:

the FBI
the Bureau of Prisons (and the US ain't known for its lack of prisons!)
the DEA

-- COMBINED.

And is any of it for judges? To at least cos-play due process before shoving people into Alligator Auschwitz?

Nope—just more agents.

And more facilities.

And some Alaska scraps, apparently enough for MurCOWERski (to use a Trumpian-style nickname, oh the sophistication!) to refrain from casting a "NO" vote that would have saved millions of lives (not to mention avoid this final nail in the climate-change coffin).