Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

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

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Petty moves from a petty man.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

He really is that stupid.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

No one could have predicted…

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

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Another Fun Day at the Beach

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Sister Devon and I had another nice day- Devon spent a good deal of time at the beach, and I spent a good bit of time floating in the pool- I call it doing manatee impressions. Spent some time splashing around with some of the local kids, who are on Christmas vacation, and I impressed them by knowing some Fortnite dances by name. We all pissed off the old grumpy guy who was sunbathing on the chair and expected to remain totally dry at the pool. Fuck him.

Afterwards, Devon and I went to dinner and people watched (I had ceviche and a chile relleno, she had something vegetarian and a tequila). We passed the time playing a game I made up called “escort or daughter,” which is honestly much harder than one would think. More on this in a minute.

We then went to a shoe store of hand made shoes from Spain (true story, I gasped and said “SHOES!” and made a beeline for the place), where I picked up a fancy pair of shoes for BFF Tammy:

Devon tried on a bunch of pairs but could not make up her mind, and the salesman (Juan Cortez is his name) turned to me and said “You should just buy a pair for your daughter.”

And just like that, the game of “escort or daughter” was ruined for me.

We’re home now, and I am nursing my bruised psyche and watching more Boston Legal.

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Open Thread: New Year, Old Memes

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Click on any of Kempf’s tweets to see the full list (and credits).

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Mitt’s Bullshit

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There are smart people I respect who have different views on the effect of Romney’s wanking (this this and this). They’re mostly negative because, well, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and Romney’s gotta verbally masturbate until the day he dies.

That said, as Trump decompensates, a few other brave Republican voices will be raised in a holy chorus which will lead to precisely nothing. Each of them will get the same treatment from the press – dutiful stenography, mild veneration, and the hope that Trump will take it up and tweet about it so they can report on the tinkle match.

Perhaps one or two members of the press could also be bothered to ask the obvious followup: “What are you going to do about it?” If the answer is nothing, just include that in the story (at least) or the headline (at best). “Romney Complains about Trump; Proposes No Solution” or “Sasse’s Trump Sass Not Reflected in any Votes”. It doesn’t seem that hard, though in practice it’s clearly impossible.

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Good News for People Who Like Bad News

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My take on New Year’s resolutions was formed watching Ordinary People when I was but a wee lad. In that movie, around New Year’s, Elizabeth McGovern’s Dinah Manhoff’s character shares the resolution “Let’s agree to have a really good year” with one of her friends, and the next we hear about her, we learn she committed suicide. To me, that’s about what a resolution is worth.

If you think that’s a dark tale, I have an even darker one for you: I just returned from a trip to the Dakota heartland, where the real (read: old and white) Americans live. Since the politics of 2019 and most of 2020 will be dictated by them, and since anecdotes are the only way to really know what our mysterious overlords are thinking, here’s one:

The real American town where I grew up is 100 miles from anything else big. (By “big”, I mean over 5,000 in population, with shopping and healthcare services). For the past 75 years, my home town has had a nursing home. For the past 50 or so years, an even smaller town about 20 miles away has also had a nursing home. Together, they housed around 200 patients in facilities close to where those patients had lived for most of their lives. Nobody wants to go the nursing home, but they were both clean, well-run, and nearby.

Well, no more. One of these homes has closed, and the second is closing in the next month or two. The reasons are varied: Some shitty corporation from Jersey bought one of the homes and ran it into the ground; Medicaid reimbursement (applicable to 2/3 of patients in South Dakota) falls an average of $34/day short in paying the expenses of a patient at these small town facilities, and so on. The net of all this is that patients are being moved to homes at least 100 miles away, and in some cases much farther. Decent jobs (by area standards) at those homes are also leaving town.

The South Dakota state legislature is too busy making abortion punishable by drawing and quartering to do anything about this. The Federal delegation, all Republicans, aren’t going to do a god damned thing but shake their heads and sympathize. Everyone’s hands are tied because Tax Cut Jesus won’t let the evil government spend any more money on poors, even if they are old white poors who weren’t poor when they went into the nursing home, but all their money was spent as they lay in a moaning, incontinent fetal ball in the Alzheimer’s wing. Even though these poors might deserve something, the other poors could be brown and undeserving! And, as Tax Cut Jesus clearly said in John Thune’s copy of the bible, “Better that 100 deserving white poors be hauled hundreds of miles from their relatives to die alone, than one undeserving brown poor get a couple of bucks of government money.”

What’s interesting to me is that most of the people I spoke with – and these are old people, mind you, who might end up in the home very soon – had little hope. For a long list of complicated reasons, the home 20 miles away could possibly re-open since it was started by the community years ago. They recently had a successful $500K fundraiser to buy back the equipment in the home from the last management company, which is only step one of hundreds needed to start it up again. And even if they do start it up, the fundamental issue of Medicaid reimbursement not covering the home’s nut remains. You can’t expect to have a bake sale every couple of weeks to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to house the old in this county. That’s the government’s job, but out in Trumpland, any government intervention is by definition evil, so it ain’t gonna happen.

This is what it means to live in a true red state. As long as sluts can’t get abortions and taxes never go up, every other human misery is acceptable.

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Border Lies

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Trump is lying about the border situation again this morning. Here’s one tweet with five sentences — each a bald-faced lie:

Mexico is paying for the Wall through the new USMCA Trade Deal. Much of the Wall has already been fully renovated or built. We have done a lot of work. $5.6 Billion Dollars that House has approved is very little in comparison to the benefits of National Security. Quick payback!

Trump is holding a meeting on border security with Democrats and Republicans today, according to The Post:

President Trump invited congressional leaders to the White House for a briefing on border security, the first face-to-face session involving Republicans and Democrats as the partial government shutdown entered its second week.

The briefing will occur one day before Democrats take control of the House and Trump gets his first taste of divided government.

It was unclear whether the Wednesday session would break the budget impasse — in its 11th day Tuesday — as Trump has demanded billions of dollars for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, and Democrats have rejected his request. Trump had campaigned on a pledge to build the wall at Mexico’s expense, a proposition Mexican officials called ludicrous.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security are scheduled to brief the top two leaders in each party in the House and the Senate. “Border Security and the Wall ‘thing’ and Shutdown is not where Nancy Pelosi wanted to start her tenure as Speaker! Let’s make a deal?” Trump tweeted Tuesday.

In reply to the “let’s make a deal” tweet, Pelosi in essence told Trump to blow his “deal” out his ass. But perhaps more instructive was her response to the lies about the border situation that Trump read off index cards during his televised dust-up with Pelosi and Schumer on December 11:

What the President is representing in terms of his cards over there are not factual. We have to have to an evidence-based conversation about what does work, what money has been spent, and how effective it is.

Bingo, once and future Madam Speaker. It all comes down to Trump’s willingness to tell shameless lies at an unprecedented volume. To borrow an annoying word from Silicon Valley, Trump’s shamelessness and lying “disrupted” politics as surely as Lyft and Uber wrenched the individual transportation industry right out from under old-school taxicab companies.

Our Beltway media still hasn’t adjusted to the shameless and constant lying. Millions of our fellow citizens are still walking around shell-shocked two years into the Trump LIElapalooza spectacle. It’s exhausting, and it never ends.

But now the Democrats are up to bat, and Greg Sargent at The Post makes a good case for centering their tenure on reclaiming the truth — and using the border wall fight as the opening salvo:

The near-total lack of GOP congressional oversight on the Trump administration hasn’t merely let President Trump’s corruption and authoritarianism run rampant. It has also allowed Trump’s bottomless dishonesty, bad faith and megalomaniacal delusions to fester unchecked when it comes to major governing decisions — and one glaring example is the government shutdown over his wall.

Democrats have a big opportunity to begin changing this. When they take over the House, they can use the oversight process not just to investigate Trumpian corruption and abuses, but also to try to restore facts, empiricism and good-faith information-gathering to a place in governing processes and debates…

Democrats have an opening. They should formally request that the Congressional Research Service do a comprehensive report on the current state of border security. This is exactly what the CRS is for. As CRS has explained, it provides lawmakers with detailed empirical information at all stages of the process, including helping them “better understand the existing situation” so they can “assess whether there is a problem requiring a legislative remedy…”

Democrats can also hold hearings at which Homeland Security officials are directly asked to testify to the state of border security. As it happens, a 2017 Homeland Security report found that the border is more secure than it has ever been, which also undercuts Trump’s wall rage-fantasies. Democrats could bring in the authors of that report and ask them to reiterate and explain this conclusion and justify “why we need to spend X dollars on a wall,” [Cornell Law Professor Josh] Chafetz noted, which “itself would make good television.”

Sargent admits the obvious — lies travel faster than truth. Hearings and reports won’t yield as much click-bait as xenophobic lies. But he notes that “effectively presented truths can also go viral” — as happened when someone smuggled audio of crying children from one of Trump’s baby jails.

The meeting Trump called is reportedly taking place in the Situation Room to underscore the national security implications of the border fight. Or maybe that location was chosen to give Trump an excuse to keep the press out so he doesn’t get his balls handed to him on live TV again.

In either case, I hope Nancy Pelosi will make another statement emphasizing the importance of having a reality-based debate on border security funding. Insisting on the truth having a role in policy-making will be an uphill battle given that the president is a pathological liar, everyone in his party is either a spineless enabler and/or evil knave, and too many Beltway journalists are maladaptive, lazy and/or dumb as a bag of hair. But the truth is worth fighting for!

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Expansion and elections

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This happened yesterday:

Next month, Maine will expand Medicaid as well with coverage being retroactive to last July.

Elections matter for expansions. And right now our initial evidence is that an expansion is mostly a one way ratchet with some backsliding. Governors and political parties that don’t like expansions can prevent an expansion from happening as we see in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas. However governors that don’t like expansions can not fully roll back an expansion that has already been implemented. Kentucky is the most aggressive state in trying to limit its expansion of medical insurance coverage (private and Medicaid) after a change in political regimes, but the roll-back is by hassle and hurdle of work reporting requirements and informational FUD rather than explicit repeals.

We should be seeing at least three more states expand Medicaid in the next 365 days, so the ratchet will continue forward.

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