Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Their freedom requires your slavery.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

You are here: Home / Organizing & Resistance / Enhanced Protest Techniques / Thursday Morning Open Thread

Thursday Morning Open Thread

by | 79 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,


.

Despite the 22F temperature, the biting wind, the unexpectedly heavy light pollution from passing traffic, and the clouds scudding in at great speed, Spousal Unit & I saw at least half a dozen bright Geminid meteors flash across the sky, so we’re satisfied with our expedition.

Apart from resolutely staying positive, what’s on the agenda for the day?
.

***********

Strong contender (in a year full of them) for Best Internet Protest of the Year, as reported by David Roth at Deadspin

… On Wednesday, a number of prominent Native American activists began tweeting a statement purporting to announce that Washington’s NFL team would, next season, be changing its name to the Washington RedHawks…

If you were scrolling through Twitter with your mind in energy-saver mode, which is really the only safe way to do it, this looked like more than just an attempt to hustle a hashtag. It looked for all the world like news, albeit of the unlikeliest kind. Not just in the sense that it was good news, although there’s obviously that, but in the sense that it was being covered everywhere.

Or, more accurately, it was being “covered” “everywhere.” There were what appeared to be links to what appeared to be stories from what appeared to be major sports publications—the Washington Post, Bleacher Report, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated—that reported, in a rough simulacrum of those venues’ house styles, various angles on the story. The team issued no such statement, and the stories were all fakes that appeared on rather shockingly artful spoofs of each of those publications’ pages. Each of the hoax pages had been registered last month, through the French web registrar Gandi SAS by a registrant named Mark Jones. There is a field for “registrant organization” on Gandi’s form, but Jones left it blank…

The ghoulish bile-baiting tone of most Fake Sports News was nowhere to be found in these stories, each of which told the story of a team belatedly doing the right thing at the end of another lost season and of Native American activists belatedly seeing their advocacy turn into a hard-won reality. More than that, these stories told the story well, with quotes from all the appropriate corners…

It is so easy to admire the technical deftness and general craftsmanship behind the RedHawks hoax that it’s worth taking a moment to consider how slashing the satirical intent is, here. It emerges gradually as you click across the various spoof sites, as the realization builds that all this decency and equanimity just sounds wrong coming from the people it’s coming from. There is no more devastating assessment of how Daniel Snyder has handled his team’s shameful name than imagining him saying, as he’s “quoted” in the Sports Illustrated spoof: “[The RedHawks] is a symbol of everything we stand for: strength, courage, pride, and respect—the same values we know guide Native Americans and which are embedded throughout their rich history as the original Americans.” It’s all the more so when you realize that this is an exact quote from an actual statement that Snyder made in 2013, in defense of continuing to call his team the Redskins…

Reader Interactions

79Comments

  1. 1.

    opiejeanne

    So one Washington will have the Redhawks while the other Washington has the Seahawks.

    Works for me.

  2. 2.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Cloudy with a high of 36 and of course, I’m working outside. At least the winds will be light.

  4. 4.

    lowtechcyclist

    Redhawks?

    What I don’t get is, how can you be woke enough to think something needs to be done about the Redskins name (whether or not you’re a football fan), and not think the whole thing’s irrelevant on account of CTE?

    Excluding Native Americans, of course.

  11. 11.

    Amir Khalid

    Alas, the change of name to Washington Redhawks is a hoax. Nonetheless, I suggest that everyone start calling the Redskins by this far more respectable name.
    ETA: I should always read to the end of a post before I comment. But my suggestion stands.

  12. 12.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Moore’s refusal to concede speaks volumes about the current crisis of Christian evangelicalism in America.

    To be clear: For a candidate to say he is “waiting for God to speak” viz election results is to say he is waiting for God to anoint him…

    …the rightful victor. It is to say that there is no world in which God would will for a Democrat to win.

    All of which is to say, of course, that none of this, as with so much of (largely white) Christian evangelicalism these days…

    …is really about God. It is about men/women consumed by a hubris and tribal derangement that God reflects their politics…

    ..when moments like these should actually encourage good faith evangelical Christians to question whether their politics are reflecting God.

    -Elaine Plott.

  13. 13.

    Immanentize

    Hello All. Doug Jone is still gonna be a Senator even if the Redskins*ns have not changed their name.
    @Amir Khalid:

    I should always read to the end of a post before I comment

    Hard lesson to learn…

  19. 19.

    Just one more canuck

    @ThresherK: hey – there’s only one team called the Roughriders now – Ottawa’s team is called the RedBlacks (no one up here understands it either)

  20. 20.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Immanentize: @Amir Khalid: As an atheist, I am always left a little bit agog at the hubris exhibited by some of the more religious adherents, that they think they can actually speak for their God, that their tiny little brains can comprehend all that their God is supposed to be. I always thought their first and foremost duty was to approach God with humility.

  22. 22.

    Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    It is our duty to be humble, not only before God, but in all things.

    In part, it’s recognition that we come from God, but we all fall short of His glory.

    I’m the first to admit that I don’t always act humble, but it is the goal.

  24. 24.

    Cermet

    @J R in WV: So, instead of admitting the sexual assault and maybe helping that poor person come to grips with the crime done against them (and pay the penalty owed to the victim and society; and maybe get the help they need for depression that they apparently had) this guy kills himself hurting his family, friends and possibly even the victim (who might now feel bad about this outcome and maybe blame themselves (too many sexual assault victims apparently do – while pure unadulterated speculation but possible.)

  25. 25.

    Immanentize

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    approach God with humility

    Like chastity for priests, it is a goal an ideal — not always attainable. But hubris — pride — now that is a deadly sin.

  26. 26.

    Cermet

    @OzarkHillbilly: LOL – As an atheist, too, I am never surprised in the least by any and all so-called believers ability to support complete nonsense with concepts of god. But then, the brain evolved to support these silly beliefs and this does trap most people – that and their knowledge of their own inevitable death.

  27. 27.

    Huggy Bear

    @Immanentize: Nope. Ashcroft lost to a dead guy and he didn’t get declared the winner. The governor would just appoint whoever is conducting the most potentially dangerous investigation of her administration.

  29. 29.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @J R in WV:

    He was a world class shit with a history of lies, financial frauds, arson and general criminality. In a divorce I did about 5 yrs ago, he “bought” a nearly new Lincoln worth about 50K from one of his congregants (my client’s soon-to-be-ex) husband for $500 in an effort to shield the asset. It didn’t work, as the court presented a very stark set of options to the husband on how it would be counted.

  30. 30.

    Jeffro

    Hey if they change the name to the Redhawks I will go back to rooting for them for the first time in over 25 years

    /NoVA native

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    Good thing of the week, home game edition.

    Had an episode of ‘just for a minute, gonna rest my eyeszzzzz’ Wednesday night. Cake already baking in the oven at the same time.

    Woke up and it was around an hour after the time when the cake was supposed to have come out. Turns out it is just fine. Still moist, perfectly edible; top, bottom and outside perimeter barely the teensiest bit toasty.

  36. 36.

    James E Powell

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Great idea at the end, but will we be able to find any good faith evangelical Christians? Also too, if they were able to question themselves they probably wouldn’t be evangelical Christians.

  39. 39.

    Bruce K

    @OzarkHillbilly: Full comprehension of divinity always seemed a bit to me like trying to play Halo on an Atari 2600. Or in the case of some GOP god-botherers, an old Hewlett-Packard calculator. (If I recall correctly, with some work, you could get a crude lunar-lander game programmed into the HP-25, but that was about it…)

  41. 41.

    Kay

    “The side that has the energy and anger and enthusiasm usually prevails,” said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania. “And Democrats don’t have to be for anything, they just have to be against us.”

    It isn’t true that Democrats aren’t running “for” something. They seem to be specifically running “for” health care”. In Virginia they also ran “for” education. Really if you look at state races Democrats have won in the last 6 years education seems to be a very good thing for Democrats to be “for”- it was central to them winning governor in Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Virginia. Twice in Virginia.

    If Trump’s tax cut for rich people passes I would go so far as to predict what (national, federal) Democrats will be running for- Medicare.

  42. 42.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @James E Powell: There are as many kinds of evangelicals as there are of any other faith (or lack thereof). We only hear about the hard core conservative ones because they squawk the loudest. My niece is a good evangelical. It helps that she is a wonderful, loving, caring individual.

  46. 46.

    zhena gogolia

    In line at the pharmacy yesterday, a woman asked me if I knew about some cut to Social Security coming next month. I said, no, but I did know they were trying to cut SS and Medicare in general. She said, “That should be against the law!”

  47. 47.

    Kay

    COLLINS says GOP should not wait for Jones to be seated to vote on taxes.

    Continuing to voluntarily lead the fight to pass this crap tax bill and gut Medicare. I bet she wants the debate closed- it’s revealing her as a complete fraud.

  48. 48.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Ah, the classic. I had a case last year with a $650,000.00 a year doctor on the other side making that threat. Once I stopped laughing, I managed to calm my client’s nerves.

  50. 50.

    Steeplejack

    @Kay:

    And Democrats don’t have to be for anything, they just have to be against us.

    Pure Republican projection, as usual. He is turning Cleek’s Law* inside out and claiming it describes the Democrats.

    * Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.

  51. 51.

    Kay

    While the White House’s efforts to tackle the opioid epidemic have so far resulted in few new sweeping initiatives and virtually no new funding for addiction treatment and prevention, Conway has been engaged on the issue from the start. One report late last month referred to her as the administration’s “opioids czar,” a description the White House promptly rejected.

    I live in “opiod central” and I can tell you the Trump White House has not done ONE THING to address this “crisis”. Not one. They convened a bullshit commission and they send political hacks around the country to sit in meetings and furrow their brows with concern.

    Obama did FAR more simply by expanding Medicaid and he did without the grandstanding and the political operatives like KellyAnne Conway claiming credit and planting stories in newspapers to promote their own careers like she planted this one. The single low income rehab facility we have in this county is due completely to the efforts of Obama and Sherrod Brown.

    The “opiod crisis” has peaked and is on the decline. We have more people indicted for meth than we do for heroin, again.

  52. 52.

    Fester Addams

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    We only hear about the hard core conservative ones because they squawk the loudest

    So (in Alabama) the good ones don’t vote? Because wasn’t it 80% of (white) people who identified as evangelical voted for Moore?

  53. 53.

    lowtechcyclist

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Moore’s refusal to concede speaks volumes about the current crisis of Christian evangelicalism in America.

    I wish I could agree that American white evangelicalism was in a moment of crisis. Alas, I think the crisis came and went decades ago.

    This isn’t to say there aren’t decent individual evangelicals. But as a movement, it’s been an abomination for most of my 47 years as a born-again Christian. Since the late 1970s when Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell Sr. turned evangelicalism into a political movement, it’s cared nothing for the truth.

    I’ve been reading this article in Christianity Today that HumboldtBlue linked to in one of yesterday’s threads, which tries and fails to grapple with the evangelical response to Trump and Moore as a crisis. I’ve been thinking about a response, and the main thing that comes to mind is that other than a brief mention at the end, the author never talks about love.

    And the love of Christ is what this is all about. If God wasn’t love, I wouldn’t be a Christian. An evangelical politics that has nothing to do with love has nothing to do with Christ. A politics that isn’t about loving one’s neighbor, that isn’t about seeing that ‘the least of these’ are helped when they need help – such a politics fails at being Christian.

    A politics that sees Christians as victims, as persecuted, as marginalized, in America in the 21st century – that’s another thing the author tries to justify. Drives me nuts. God is bigger than all this. If His love is with us, it doesn’t matter who’s against us. That evangelicals see themselves as victims, as persecuted, here and now in America, inevitably makes me think: can these people possibly know the Lord? Because I knew better than that from the very beginning, from the very night my walk with the Lord began. How do you know the Lord and not know this? I just don’t get it.

  55. 55.

    Emma

    @Fester Addams: Alabama is in the SOUTH. Most branches of Southern evangelicals are deeply racist. They will vote Republican no matter what.

    And 80% means 20% of evangelicals voted for Jones, doesn’t it? They might be a minority but they are there.

  56. 56.

    Jeffro

    Hey I know we like to bang on the NYT and rightly so, but here’s a lil’ something to share with your RWNJ friends and relatives…and everyone else (warning, the title seems a little infuriating at first, at least to me, but the content surely isn’t):

    Trump’s Lies vs. Obama’s (or, ‘A Mountain vs Not Even a Mole Hill’)

    I can haz a similar graph of their golfing habits next please NYT?

  57. 57.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Fester Addams: I mentioned yesterday that i felt like DEM voters were energized and Republican voters weren’t, that even if they still could not bring themselves to vote for a DEM, neither could they vote for Moore. So a lot of them stayed home. The ones who didn’t? They were the ones who like Moore, believe he is an instrument of God.

  58. 58.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Kay:

    They’ve burnt out their own party through ideological manipulation from their right flank.

  59. 59.

    donnah

    I attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in the late 70’s, when the mascot was a Miami Indian. We were the Miami Redskins. There was not a grotesque caricature figure running around during sporting events, but an actual student who attended a seminar by tribal council on how to wear his authentic clothing and perform a ceremonial war dance. It was all done under the supervision of the Miami tribal branch.

    But it still was not right, and in 1997 the Miami president proposed a change to a new mascot. The alumni were given options to vote for, and they chose a Redhawk. To be honest, there was a big backlash and a lot of alumni dropped their donations to Miami, but in the long run things have been fine.

    It’s way past the time to change the offensive sports team names to ones that don’t blatantly promote old stereotypes and insult groups of people. It’s expensive and messy, but it’s the right thing to do. If a university can go from Redskins to Redhawks, a pro team can, too.

  60. 60.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @lowtechcyclist: A read an article not too long ago that a number of evangelicals are dropping the “Evangelical” from their church names because of the political baggage that has attached itself to that word. It is baggage they don’t agree with at all and want nothing to do with.

  61. 61.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Kay:

    As always, addressing it requires resources. Needle exchanges are cheap, and are often the first point of contact with the addict. The real expense is in adequately funded treatment centers, and I’m not talking outpatient. Inpatient facilities, designed for dorm housing for six months and longer. Good staff, too. Methadone or suboxone as needed. Thinking one long term facility for 50 patients per 100,000 population.

    Beef up the laws on rehab commitment as well.

  62. 62.

    Peale

    @Kay: it would be nice in the post Obama era of the party to become the public education party again. It’s one of those areas where the upper middle class people who end up in charge of the party really decided to separate themselves from their voters. They all want good private schools. Their voters want to be told that sending their kids to public schools and state colleges is the right thing to do for their children because they don’t have that many options. If the democrats would make a concerted effort to promote within their ranks people who came up through the public school system, they might end up with a better perspective that’s more in line with the voters they are trying to reach. The GOP makes it too easy for Democrats to be “pro education” simply by default. Dems can run on “well at least the schools will be open more than 4 months a year” … the GOP can’t do even that. But after that, the Dems at the high levels of the party appeared for the past eight years to be bought and paid for by the wealthy anti public school lobby.

  63. 63.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Anyone who knows me as a former Evangelical knows that I’m not going to defend Evangelical ideology or the peculiar status that many Evangelicals accord to the Bible, which I think a form of idolatry. But ordinary Christians aren’t cartoon characters; human beings are always more complex and often a great deal better than the ideologies they get sucked into, and that includes Evangelicals.

    Sure, the Church includes men like Moore and the pedophilia apologists who have taken to the airwaves on his behalf. It includes con artists like Creflo Dollar. It includes atavistic patriarchs like Mark Driscoll who parrot the woman-demeaning mantras from the Bible and Church leaders past. It includes people with such tunnel vision that they think being anti-abortion makes one pro-life. It includes tone-deaf youtube hipsters who proclaim that their oh-so-dope religion isn’t actually a religion. And like any institution, the Church is rife with more mundane manifestations of selfishness, exceptionalism, greed, dishonesty, and pettiness. But that is not the whole picture.

    My own church included a youth minister whose idea of leadership was getting to be first in line when the teens went waterskiing. Meanwhile, though, unpaid volunteer members with an ideal of “servant leadership” patiently coached beginning skiers even if it meant that they themselves never got wet.

    My church included a self-certain associate pastor who advised my 90-lb. sister to “pray and stay” when her husband became abusive. But after that husband crossed someone bigger and better armed than my sister–and got himself shot—members of the same congregation brought food for weeks and, then in the years that followed, helped her fix her plumbing, keep her house repaired, and raise her kids.

    My church included people who thought my gay brother was evil and slated for hell, and others whose love for him forced them to confront the atrocious theology of eternal torture. It included paid “friendship missionaries” who exploited the loneliness of foreign students to win converts; and volunteers who simply helped in the soup kitchen no matter what.

    In other words, it included cold-heartedness and compassion, self-righteousness and humility, dogma and discernment, greed and generosity, exploitation and altruism. And it often included all of these inside the same individuals, because each of us is big enough to contain a legion of contradictions—just like the folks who wrote Bible.

    -Valerie Tarico.

  64. 64.

    MomSense

    @Kay:

    I actually think she is in some trouble on this. Her staff locked the doors to her offices early with people outside wanting to go in to meet. They were informed that if they didn’t leave the lobby at 5pm they would be arrested. No one answers the phones and it’s impossible to even get voice mail. If this is such a great deal for Mainers then why is she hiding from us?

  65. 65.

    mad citizen

    My idea for that football team is no name change at all. Simply adopt the redskin potato as the mascot. Done.

  66. 66.

    Spanky

    @Kay:

    Tackle the opioid epidemic

    means any and all variants of “how can we make a buck off of this?” Full stop.

  67. 67.

    BC in Illinois

    @lowtechcyclist:

    “BC in Illinois,” who now lives in Missouri, began as “BC in Washington DC.”

    I was a fan of the “football team for some reason not formerly known as the Washington Redskins”, going back to the days of Sonny Jurgensen, Charley Taylor, John Riggins, and Doug Williams. (And I can go on.) I was in the “yeah, the name is wrong, but they don’t mean it in a bad way” camp, until I was in my 60s. Precisely until John Oliver addressed the issue in 2014. It came about at the same time when — within the same week — President Obama and Charles Krauthammer [!] both said that the name should be changed. John Oliver showed a Native American anti-name video and then said

    The strongest possible pushback you can have, after seeing something amazing like that, is to say:
    “Yeah, but, . . . Aah, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. We’ve gotta change the name. You’re right.”

    Then add in various cheating scandals, which led me to conclude that “if _____________ are playing, I won’t watch the game” (which meant, yes, that there were Super Bowls I didn’t watch). Then add in the concussions. I can’t watch another person carried off the field after a “hard hit.” I’m done.

    This is the first football season since watching football with the family on a black-and-white TV during the Eisenhower administration in which I have not watched even part of an NFL game.

    Yes, the ‘Skins should change their name. No, I don’t think that would bring me back.

  69. 69.

    NotMax

    @MomSense

    Vaguely recall something regarding Bannon trying to drum up a campaign for LePage’s wife to run against Angus King in 2018. Anything more locally being hinted at about that?

  70. 70.

    drdavechemist

    @OzarkHillbilly: Here in the home of Roger Williams and the First Baptist Church in America, one local congregation dropped the word “Baptist” from the name of the church, presumably to avoid their relatively liberal American Baptist affiliation being confused with the ultra-conservative Southern Baptists that most people associate with the name. Also in Bloomington, IN, the church I attended there which used to specifically identify as the merger of two churches (First (American) Baptist Church/United Church of Christ), is now just First United Church. I suspect lots of people who really pay attention to the message of the New Testament are tired of being associated with the talibangelicals.

  71. 71.

    Another Scott

    Morning all.

    GovExec – It looks like Charlie and the Democrats are still playing hardball:

    This story has been updated to reflect the introduction of a new CR that would fund agencies through January 19.

    Democrats have rejected a Republican plan to fully fund the Defense Department for the remainder of fiscal 2018 while continuing stopgap appropriations into January for the rest of government, setting back negotiations to avoid a shutdown just before Christmas.

    House Republicans had pushed the proposal for a joint continuing resolution-Defense omnibus to boost spending at the Pentagon as lawmakers negotiated revised spending caps for domestic federal agencies, but Senate Democrats have effectively killed that option before it got off the ground. Nearly all of the caucus wrote a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., telling them the idea was a non-starter.

    The Democrats said such a measure would neglect domestic priorities such as homeland security, veterans and agriculture. They instead encouraged Republicans to continue to engage in bipartisan talks.

    “As you know, Democrats and Republicans are engaged in bipartisan negotiations to craft a budget agreement for Fiscal Years 2018 and 2019 that would avoid devastating sequestration cuts to defense and domestic programs,” the senators wrote. “We urge you to keep your commitment to the bipartisan budget negotiations and forego any plans to consider partisan legislation known as a ‘CRomnibus.’”

    House Republicans met Wednesday afternoon to discuss their strategy going forward on upcoming spending votes. By Wednesday evening, they had introduced their Defense-plus-CR plan.

    […]

    House Democrats, labeling the proposal “Puntagon,” said on Wednesday the measure would “risk damage” from a “shutdown or cuts.”

    Current appropriations fund agencies through Dec. 22. In addition to the immediate shutdown threat, lawmakers must agree to a spending package for the remainder of fiscal 2018. Congress is working on a plan to raise the spending caps established by the 2011 Budget Control Act and avoid a sequestration. Negotiators will likely seek a two-year reprieve from those caps, as they did in late 2013 and 2015.

    Democrats, who hold leverage as any Senate measure to raise spending caps would require 60 votes, have maintained that any increase for defense spending must be matched with an equal uptick for non-defense agencies.

    “We must lift the spending caps for defense and also those urgent domestic priorities, in equal measure,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on Tuesday. “That has been the basis of successful budget agreements going back several years, and as recently as April of this year. It was parity between defense and nondefense and that is how it ought to stay. That is what brought us home into a good agreement and no shutdowns in previous years.”

    Current caps restrict spending to $549 billion for defense and $516 billion for non-defense agencies in fiscal 2018. House Republicans are seeking to raise that number to $640 billion for defense, a figure Democrats would agree to if domestic agencies receive an equal increase. Even a continuing resolution for the remainder of fiscal 2018 would exceed the existing caps, according to the Congressional Budget Office. About $2.4 billion would be sequestered from defense accounts, while about $2.3 billion would be sequestered from non-defense accounts, CBO estimated.

    The Office of Management and Budget would make the final determination on the amounts of any sequestration. An OMB official previously said there is no risk of the administration revoking any funds in 2017. The office typically assesses whether a sequestration is necessary in January. If a CR is still in place at that point, the official said, the administration would work with Congress to ensure that “no unintended sequestration occurs.”

    Democrats this week appeared to have backed off their demands that Congress resolve the status of certain undocumented immigrants who will become vulnerable to deportation in early 2018 due to a policy Trump announced earlier this year as a condition of any spending measure carrying agencies into January. Lawmakers are still negotiating an agreement on that issue, subsidies to stabilize health insurance markets, funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program and emergency funding for disaster relief, all of which could get wrapped into a forthcoming spending bill.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  72. 72.

    Leto

    Is this the place to talk about the Net Neutrality vote today? I figure it’s a forgone conclusion, but still…

  73. 73.

    peter

    @Immanentize: The satisfaction of those who steadfastly pursue virtue is a habit of their souls which is called tranquility and peace of mind. But the fresh satisfaction we gain when we have performed an action we think good is a passion — a kind of joy which I consider to be the sweetest of all joys, because its cause depends only on ourselves. But when this cause is not just, i.e., when the actions from which we derive great satisfaction are not very important or are even vicious, the satisfaction is absurd and serves only to produce a kind of vanity and impertinent arrogance. This is noticeable especially in those who believe themselves devout, but who are merely bigoted and superstitious. These are people who — under the pretext of frequently going to church, reciting many prayers, wearing their hair short, fasting, and giving alms — think they are absolutely perfect and imagine that they are such close friends of God that they could not do anything to displease him. They suppose that anything their passion dictates is a commendable zeal, even though it sometimes dictates the greatest crimes that men can commit, such as they betrayal of cities, the killing of sovereigns, and the extermination of whole nations for the sole reason that the citizens do not accept their opinions. (René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul [1649], paragraph 190)

  76. 76.

    Salvatore Napoli

    I had a better idea a couple years ago. Do some research on Northeast American Indian tribes. Which tribe or tribes dominated what is now the Washington Metro area, Maryland, Virginia. Choose one. Then pay royalties to the chosen tribe. If Snyder moves the team, change the name to the tribe that dominated that region. And pay them.

  77. 77.

    J R in WV

    @Cermet:

    Evidently Dan Johnson shot himself in the head last night after being accused in a police report of assaulting a 17 year old member of his church. Mr Johnson referred to himself as the Pope of his church.

    The WaPo story says:

    But the seven-month investigation, comprised of more than 100 interviews and thousands of pages of public records, alleges the Republican’s persona is orchestrated to mask a series of troubling incidents — including sexual abuse, arson and false testimony.

    Evidently his church allowed drinking to excess and something called body shots at parties in the home next door to the church where “pope” Johnson lived. I’ve been to a lot of parties and never seen anyone do body shots, whatever that is. And nope, I don’t need a technical explanation.

    What a creep!

  79. 79.

    Skepticat

    @MomSense: And they were arrested, which prompted me to send her a copy of the text of the First Amendment. Although I’m out of the country, I’m berating “my” less-favorite senator (I love the other one and send him only attaboys) as often as possible, and I’ve sicced my family in Maine on her. I don’t know who’ll run against her next time, but I’m pretty certain I’ll be all-in for whoever it is.

Comments are closed.