Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Food for thought

It makes sense if you ignore all those real world factors and just look at numbers on a spreadsheet, which are filtered with "Born in USA".

@pixelburp "In what respect? Not sure a noted right-wing senator espousing The Great Replacement conspiracy theory has much to contribute here. For sure we know the MAGA crowd are hell-bent on stopping Ukrainian aid, this guy's rant is only confirming what we know about their demagoguery."

Long term, population depletion has consequences. Even short term. Russia's population is decreasing by 700,000 per year. Not to mention those being killed in Ukraine - that's another 300,000. Likewise with Japan and most western countries. There are endless ramifications from this that affect current policy in all countries.

Hopefully sorted soon.

What else can you expect from a Country where its own women will not bring babies into the World???

The real issue to be overcome in the house is Mike Johnson. He's already signalled that he's not keen. And if he doesn't schedule the vote then it will never occur.

He's been making noise again that he wants border control measures as part of this. However the 4 month long highly conservative negotiated border control + foreign aid failed in the senate last week. Astoundingly voted against by the very republicans who negotiated the bill. Utter madness. But that's the Republican party under the influence of Trump for you. And Johnson was against it before the details of the bill were even revealed. So it's pretty obvious that Johnson is just kinda doing what Trump wants.

So this leaves a few options.

1. Johnson is removed by a vote of no confidence and replaced by someone who will bring the bill to the floor. This would require a vote by 3 republicans who are not afraid of Trump or his MAGA cohort. Funnily enough there's been a few house republicans who are strongly pro ukraine that have recently announced they won't be running for their seats again in November. So they'd be immune to the Trump threat. https://twitter.com/cathymcmorris/status/1755670100038816171 , https://twitter.com/RepGallagher/status/1756389895096918262. At which point some cohort of the democrats would need to offer a vote of no confidence protection to the next speaker. They didn't do this for Kevin McCarthy and in my opinion that was an enormous mistake. But I don't know how likely this whole scenario is.
2. Something called a discharge petition. Where all the democrats and either 3-5 house republicans,(I think, depending on how many democrats of the 218 they'd lose) would be needed to basically force the issue to the floor past Johnson. Democrats have said they're considering this move and some Republicans have also made noise that they'd support it. It would be quite rare and these things don't work very often. It would also be highly embarrassing for Johnson but weirdly be the out that he'd need to avoid losing his speaker position and have plausible deniability to stop Trump killing his career in the primaries.
3. Johnson calls the vote due to senate pressure. Probably won't happen.

As far as I've read these are the options available. But then I'm not political expert either so take everything I say with a grain of salt. There's enormous pressure to get this bill passed but also substantial opposition. I do think if it makes it to the floor for a vote it'll get enough votes. But getting there will be the real battle. So fingers crossed.

Just another day of threatening your neighbours again.

Just browsing recent articles on Novoya Gazeta.

Here are some snapshots as a country collectively loses its mind and descends further into totalitarianism:

• Woman arrested for "tickling" WWII monument
• Doctor arrested after being accused by a patient of denigrating Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine
• Duolingo investigated for propagating LGBT propaganda in Russia

Imagine if all of those cranks on twitter who get offended by everything suddenly had the power to get people arrested on trumped up charges. That seems to be what is happening right now in Russia. A bunch of ghouls looking for excuses to throw others to the wolves so that they can feel like they are doing their part (without actually going off to fight in the war of course.)

Once they can hit Moscow and St Petersburg, that's effectively Russia. The twin heads of the snake.