Other 25% are still conducting research https://t.co/ldTuBv6Rz6 pic.twitter.com/97rBnt6y6P
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) September 24, 2021
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Friday / Saturday, Sept. 24-25Post + Comments (47)
This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Foreign Affairs
Other 25% are still conducting research https://t.co/ldTuBv6Rz6 pic.twitter.com/97rBnt6y6P
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) September 24, 2021
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Friday / Saturday, Sept. 24-25Post + Comments (47)
by John Cole| 88 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
I had a bear of a week, so it was very nice to spend some time today heading to the orchard. Not many varieties are availablke yet, but I did score a big 10lb bag of mixed apples for dad to make applesauce, a 5lb bag of Zestars, a 5lb bag of Honeycrisp, and a 5lb bag of Gingergold. Snapdragons and Crimson Crisp come in next week, and I am excited about that.
One of the things I most look forward to every day is around 9 o’clock, I have a big bowl of fruit of whatever I can find or is in season. I’ve been doing a lot of watermelon and papaya the last couple weeks, and tonight I am happy to be eating a really nice gingergold. I’m so happy my dad introduced me to so much fruit as a kid.
Other than that, not much going on at the homefront you all would care about.
This post is in: Open Threads, Republicans in Disarray!, Trumpery
The only upside of all this endless vote recounting from the 2020 election is seeing Trump lose over and over again.
— Unstable Isotope (@UnstableIsotope) September 24, 2021
BREAKING: “The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results.”https://t.co/bf1sACM1wB
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 24, 2021
Whoah brah so you hired the two crooks from Home Alone to do a complex audit and they subcontracted it out to the Unabomber and the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit and it didn’t come out the way you hoped? No way you could have known
— ThousandIslandVaccineHat (@Popehat) September 24, 2021
MAGAs who didn't have the core strength to storm the Capitol spent months eyeballing individual ballots for bamboo fibers and in the end padded Biden's win by several hundred votes. Howling.
— zeddy (@Zeddary) September 24, 2021
I hope, for my own amusement, that Trump sues Cyber Ninjas.
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) September 24, 2021
Friday Evening Open Thread: CYBER. NINJAS!Post + Comments (110)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 32 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Kevin Drum points out that one of the casualties of shrinking the reconciliation bill from $3.5 trillion will be the extended Obamacare subsidies. Other middle-class benefits on the chopping block include the child tax credit, universal Pre-K, two years of free community college and funding for long-term care done at home.
I wrote a while back about my adventures looking at Obamacare plans. There is nothing great about this insurance. You can easily pay $7-14K out of pocket for relatively common medical issues. But, at least with the extended subsidy, people making > 400% of the Federal Poverty Level can get a subsidy. For example, a couple making $80K per year, which is just a wee bit over 400% (which is $70K), would get a $470/month subsidy. This cuts your Bronze plan premium to about $500/month, and Silver is about $740/month. That’s still expensive when you’re making $80K. But without that subsidy, a couple making $80K is on the hook for almost $6K more in premiums. That’s huge.
When you take money away from someone who is budgeting on it, you really piss them off. In the minds of most normies, the Democrats control government. We own it when their insurance premiums go up $470/month, or when they aren’t getting a child tax credit, or when they have to pay a lot more out of pocket for the home health care grandma needs when she’s living at their house. We are the ones that they’ll be mad at. I wouldn’t blame anybody who lost a $6K government benefit for slamming the door in the face of a Democrat who came to their doorstep looking for a vote.
This post is in: Open Threads
Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
I suspect we will learn more about the Haitian refugee situation and the horrific photos from earlier this week.
Homeland Security Briefing LIVE (Open Thread)Post + Comments (189)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 118 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
That’s Politico, today. Here’s CovidActNow, today:
Over the last week, Florida has averaged 376.4 deaths per day, more than Mississippi, goddam, or Texas. That’s like a 777 full of passengers crashing without survivors every day. It’s 7 Greyhound buses or 54 minivans. Every fucking day. New York has less than one tenth of that number of deaths per capita.
Yes, cases are down. But anyone with more than a goldfish’s worth of mental capacity might remember just how many people this clown has killed on his watch.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 125 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
“They are beholden to their corporate donors” is such an oft-repeated phrase we tend to ignore it, but watching Manchin’s behavior tells you pretty clearly what corporate donors want. On the reconciliation bill, they want the Senate to go slow so they can review and pick apart the reconciliation bills to make sure that everything they don’t like gets deleted. Going slow also increases the possibility that nothing will happen, and the status quo is pretty good to corporations right now. On the debt ceiling, they don’t want default, but minority rule via the filibuster has been good to corporate donors, so they don’t want that changed. Instead, we’ll have a really ugly game of chicken and a compromise that will make Democrats want to puke.
Similarly, it’s all but forgotten by the media that the Republicans are the cause of all the debt ceiling anguish and they’re constantly willing to ransom the government, not to mention the health of the nation, to win, or at least make Democrats lose. The both-sides media coverage of the debt ceiling fight is a huge enabler of Republican behavior, and the media is apparently institutionally unable to change rapidly enough (or, in some cases, at all) to keep up with the Republican tactics. So, the Republicans will keep doing it.
So, while I’m all for applying pressure to Democrats to have them make an exception to a stupid rule of the Senate so they can lift or invalidate the debt ceiling, it probably won’t happen, and even if it did, the media would still shit all over Democrats for doing it. That goes double for minting a coin or any other novel solution, because if the status-quo-worshipping DC media hates anything more than something new dreamed up by Democrats, I don’t know what it is.
I don’t think any of the above is new, shocking or even controversial, but maybe you disagree.
Minting a Coin and/or Stopping the Filibuster Probably Won’t HappenPost + Comments (125)