Luke B

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Well, well, Harry. "Extremely common sense." How precious. Nothing says a confident grasp of the founding documents like calling for the abolition of a constitutional mechanism you cannot even describe. Six words, Harry — "this is extremely common sense so of course Republicans oppose it." Isn't it dangerous to use your whole vocabulary in one sentence?

Quick question: on the federal level, what do YOU personally vote for, other than a representative? Take your time. Hint: it's the House. Just the House. Senators weren't directly elected until the 17th Amendment in 1913, and the President was never SUPPOSED to be either, per Article II and the 12th Amendment. Somebody was hiding behind the door when God handed out brains and figured civics could wait.

Now Pete's quote: "we need a system where the person who gets the most votes wins the election." Profound, from a man who dropped his own campaign before Indiana ever voted in its primary. He's a Snollygoster and a Gascon rolled into one — shrewd, unprincipled, all talk, zero delivery — with zero recollection of Federalist No. 68, where Hamilton explained why the Electoral College exists: so the President never falls to a body prone to "heats and ferments," to "cabal, intrigue, and corruption," or to "the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils." Written in 1788, and it still describes this quote-tweet. His grasp of civics runs on dial-up in a fiber-optic world, and yours isn't doing much better retweeting it like scripture.

Madison, Federalist No. 10, for those keeping score at home (Harry, that's you): pure democracies "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention" and are "as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." The Founders built a REPUBLIC to filter passion through representation, because unchecked majority mood swings are how 51% legislates away the other 49 percent's rights before lunch.

Brass tacks: kill the Electoral College and campaigning collapses into five press conferences in five zip codes — New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix. Flyover country becomes scenery nobody courts again. The party of "the forgotten" engineers the system that forgets them first. Miles to go before mediocre on this one.

Here's what should keep you up at night: a close election today means a recount in ONE state. Ask Florida, 2000. Under a straight popular vote, EVERY precinct becomes contestable, since a hundred votes in rural Nebraska count exactly as much as a hundred in downtown Chicago. One Florida recount becomes fifty, forever — designed by someone who couldn't find his own rear end with both hands and a map.

What's next, somebody proposes scrapping the Senate too, since two farmers in Wyoming and two financiers in California getting equal votes offends the math... oh wait, abolishing the Electoral College already does that to the presidency! Quinn's Law #22: liberals love democracy right up until it stops handing them what they want. Nobody wanted to torch the Electoral College in 2008, 2012, or 2020 — only the two times it didn't hand your side the trophy. Sometimes the majority just means all the fools agreed on the same guy, and that's not a design flaw, that's the feature working as intended.

Goal #29 of the 45 Communist Goals for America, read into the Congressional Record by Rep. A.S. Herlong Jr., January 10, 1963: "Discredit the U.S. Constitution as inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs." Status: Pending. Pete and Democrats Deliver would love to help close that one out, live.

"Most votes wins" survives Article V — the actual, legal, three-fourths-of-the-states way you amend this — about as well as a browser with 47 tabs open and none loading. I'd explain "democratic" versus "Democracy," but I left my crayons at home, and 404 brain not found feels right here. You're proof a platform can't buy intelligence, Harry, but it sure can buy impressions.

But what do I know, I'm only someone who read Article II, the 12th Amendment, and Federalist 68 and 10 before calling something "common sense."

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@BlueCrane10108 @spencerpratt Can you elaborate further for me?

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@ItsDerek4Real @Booker4KY No. It says Make America Great Again. How is that insulting or whatever label that comes with it. I would love the slogan regardless of party affiliation. I am a proud American. And will always be.

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@WokeAFtoo @Booker4KY You’re funny. If you’re smarter than me, you would know how to have a conversation without insults. I know you can’t help yourself. I won’t insult you. I have one question for you, can men get pregnant?

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@ItsDerek4Real @Booker4KY I support policies, not the politicians. And not all the policies Republicans have I agree with. I don’t support our tax money going overseas. Israel or anyone else. Why do you have to resort to insults?

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@WokeAFtoo @Booker4KY No thanks. I love the 1st Amendment. Which also gives you the right to call me a magot. How else are we suppose to have an adult conversation?

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@ItsDerek4Real @Booker4KY No thanks. I prefer the United States. You know, the greatest country on earth. I’m Pro American. I don’t give a shit about Israel. Or any other country. America and American citizens come FIRST!

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@JBPritzker God you’re dumb.

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@MHTruthUltra Nope

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@AntiTrumpCanada Do you think most Americans give a shit what Canada thinks. How’s y’all’s healthcare system working up there?

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@RashidaTlaib You’re Muslim trash. Get the hell out of America. Go back to fake Palestine.

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

I don’t watch basketball. However, it’s obvious how they treat her. I’m not sure what proud boy you’re talking about. 🤷🏻‍♂️Are you just drawing conclusions?

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

I’m calling it what it is. The WBNA IS RACIST TOWARDS CLARK AND OTHER WHITE PLAYERS!

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@BrentRexroat So voter ID is common sense. I am happy that we agree.

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

I guess Olive Garden is racist?

[Brent Rexroat @BrentRexroat]

@olivegarden has more common sense than @RepJeffries @SenSchumer @SpeakerPelosi @CAgovernor @GovAndyBeshear @JBPritzker @GovKathyHochul
@TheDemocrats
@CoryBooker..... they're all 🤡s!
#ImportedVoters

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

@CollinRugg What a tool.

[COCO 🇺🇸 @LokiLoki28727]

@spencerpratt

[Luke B @LukeB33393]

It’s fucking ridiculous. @LeaderJohnThune get the fucking SAVE ACT PASSED!

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

I'm so fucking sick of the GOP.

"We can't do anything."

Shut the fuck up. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.

You have the House. The Senate. The White House. A Supreme Court majority.

The most unified government you've had in years, and you're telling me you CAN'T DO ANYTHING?????

You have RECONCILIATION.

You know, the filibuster-proof tool Democrats used to ram through trillions in spending with FIFTY votes?

It's sitting right there.

Do you morons understand what happens if Democrats take the midterms?

It's over.

Not "tough." Not "a setback."

FUCKING OVER.

Every DOGE cut? Gone. Did you forget you still need to CODIFY THOSE into law?!

Executive orders? Erased.
Regulation cuts? Reversed.
Border policy? Deleted.

Years of work, torched in one election cycle, because you kept saying "we'll get to it" like we gave a DAMN that you "tried".

Guess what happens when Democrats win, dumbasses?

They start passing bills.

They actually DO everything you won't do, for God knows what reason.

You're telling me if they win, they won't NUKE the filibuster ON DAY ONE?!

They've SAID it out loud, repeatedly, on camera!!!!!

Transgender plays in Uganda? Back.
Elmo in Afghanistan? Back.
NPR/PBS funding? Probably DOUBLED out of spite.
ICE? Defunded.
DC and Puerto Rico statehood? Yep.
Court packing? THEY SAID SO THIS WEEK!!!!!

Every single "crazy" thing you swore would never happen becomes a floor vote the second they hold the gavel.

Because THEY actually use power when they have it.

That's the difference between you and them, and it's fucking humiliating.

Meanwhile YOU can't even pass the SAVE Act.

Requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections is an 80/20 issue.

The easiest layup in American politics... and GOD FORBID YOU CHANGE SOME ARCHAIC SENATE RULES TO GET IT DONE because you'd rather have the ISSUE than the LAW.

You won't defund the fucking TALIBAN.

We're still watching taxpayer money leak into Afghanistan and your response is a strongly worded letter and a subcommittee hearing nobody watches.

WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?????

Don't tell me there's no time.

The House is scheduled for barely over 100 legislative days this year.

You work a THIRD of the year.

Teachers work more days than you.

AND SOMEHOW you STILL ARE FINDING ROOM FOR EVEN MORE VACATIONS!!!!!!!

GOD FORBID you actually put in some effort.

But no. Instead you give us tweets.

Fox News hits.
Cringe-ass TikToks.
Podcast appearances.

NOBODY GIVES A SINGLE FUCK ABOUT YOUR CONTENT.

Not one of us. Zero.

You're not influencers. You're lawmakers.

So make some fucking laws.

That's the job It's all we've EVER asked you to do.

Trump won't be on the ballot next time to drag YOUR SORRY ASSES ACROSS THAT FINISH LINE.

You really think you can come home, look us in the eye, and recycle the same excuses?

After THIS?

No. Not this time.

The stakes are way too high and our patience is gone.

Completely gone.

Stop telling us what you'd do "if only you had the power."

YOU HAVE THE POWER. RIGHT NOW. TODAY.

If you're too cowardly to use it, then stop fucking asking us for more of it.

...and don't act all shocked when the people you keep taking for granted stop showing up to save you from yourselves.