Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The next time the wall wtreet journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

John Fetterman: Too Manly for Pennsylvania.  Paid for by the Oz for Senator campaign.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

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

The willow is too close to the house.

The words do not have to be perfect.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Everybody saw this coming.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Friday Morning Open Thread: Kev’s Magic Minutes

Friday Morning Open Thread: Kev’s Magic Minutes

by | 176 Comments

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You can probably still find a livestream, if you’re curious:

But *first*… the Kevin McCarthy Foolabuster!

… To the tune of ‘This Magic Moment’:

The NYTimes says he set his desired record by the time he shut up ‘shortly after 5am’. If he can get the Guinness people to certify it, that will at least give him a nice plaque to hang in his office, which will probably be the most tangible record of the night’s event.

Reader Interactions

176Comments

  1. 1.

    debbie

    I read somewhere on Twitter last night about a proposal to make TFG Speaker of the House. Last night was a preview of what that would be like.

  2. 2.

    BlueGuitarist

    Remember Qevin saying, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump”?

  3. 3.

    Brantl

     

    @debbie:

    Except that the bronzer will glow in the dark, at 5 AM, while he’s sleeping on the lectern, occasionally muttering “Yuge!”, in his sleep.

  4. 4.

    Kay

    ian
    @dragemchapo
    ·22h
    Replying to
    @KevinMKruse
    In today’s new Quinnipiac poll,65% says their own financial position is excellent or good but 62% say economic condition of the nation is going in the wrong direction. That’s what a segment about inflation by NBC,ABC,CBS & NPR, 5 days a week for 7 consecutive weeks does to you.

    I DO think it’s good everyone ordered Christmas presents early, though, due to “supply chain/cancel Christmas” panic. It’s easier for delivery people when it’s not all jammed into two weeks.

  5. 5.

    Leto

    “ I’m just getting geared up”

    The least he can do is give Vizzini, from The Princess Bride, credit for that. Ofc Vizzini was in a battle of the wits, a type of warfare that Kevin has never participated in.

  8. 8.

    Geminid

    The House reconvenes in 20 minutes. Speaker Pelosi has the votes to pass the BBB bill, and she’s gonna do it.

  10. 10.

    Geminid

    @rikyrah: Good morning! It’s a sunny day in Virginia, but yesterday’s 70s will change to today’s 40s. Brrr! (Yes, I’m a temperature wimp).

  11. 11.

    John S.

    @Kay:

    Lots of polls lately on multiple topics show that cognitive dissonance is alive and well in the USA.

    62% of people say they want improvements made to Social Security, but 64% say the government shouldn’t be involved in Social Security.

  12. 12.

    Kay

    “Even if a school system hasn’t adopted the (CRT-inspired) 1619 Project, or put Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo on their summer reading lists, it’s not hard to imagine well-meaning teachers making questionable statements in the classroom.”

    From “CRT is in schools!” a month ago to “it’s not hard to imagine teachers making questionable statements in the classroom”

    Ban questionable statements in the classroom, but only in the interest of wide-ranging debate and free speech. Absolutely incoherent. Nonsense.

  14. 14.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: I read something earlier this week about remarks Rupert Murdoch made at a shareholder meeting. He said Trump (and presumably his cult) need to move on from 2020. I thought, dude, do you even watch your own network? And Fox News isn’t the worst offender these days.

    People’s insistence that the economy is in the toilet when it’s not is a species of that same problem, IMO. I don’t see how we can have rational governance when people insist on their own versions of reality. I’m not sure it’s a problem that has a (realistic) solution.

  16. 16.

    John S.

    @Kay:

    Forget about CRT… What really needs to be taught in schools is CTS: Critical Thinking Skills.

    Full disclosure, my wife is a middle school science teacher.

  17. 17.

    sixthdoctor

    @Kay: I went to a diverse, multiracial public high school with excellent teachers. My social studies/history teacher in particular is someone I still revere and whose teachings I use in everyday life.

    But I’m 50 and I had NEVER heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre until the HBO Watchmen series and I bet there are a lot of other white guys like me. HS curriculums prove the need for CRT by their content.

  18. 18.

    sab

    Kay,

    How did you make out in Ohio redistricting? I am going to be in a Republican congressional district for the first time in my voting life since 1984. I guess I need to register as a Republican to try to hold back the absolute nutcases.

  20. 20.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Maybe McCaurthy is doing this to discourage Trump from wanting to be Speaker if the GOP takes the House next year. Trump would freak about not getting his sleepy time or quarter pounders.

  21. 21.

    Geminid

    I don’t get C-Span, and last night I wondered who live-tweets House proceedings. I found out that, among others, New Republic correspondent Grace Segars does @Grace_Segars..

  22. 22.

    Kay

    @John S.:

    Shit, they spent 6 months telling people “no one would work” when we were at basically full employment, so this is just how it is now.

    No one else would work?  Each person was in fact working, but that somehow did not equal the total. Wages went up, but only for individuals, not for “other people”.

    I mean they have these other numbers if they have the inflation number. They’re reporting each part of the economy seperately, weeks apart? We had the “supply” part for 4 weeks and now we get the “demand” part. I think it was better when they linked “supply” and “demand”. Demand for employees, supply of employees, demand for goods, supply of goods. Couldn’t we go back to that? It worked okay.

  23. 23.

    Kristine

    @sixthdoctor:

    But I’m 50 and I had NEVER heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre until the HBO Watchmen series

    I’m 63 and that’s where I first heard of it as well. I figured it was because my school years were spent in 60s/70s Florida but apparently not.

  24. 24.

    Betty Cracker

    My kiddo has been out of school for a few years, so my info isn’t current, but was Robin DiAngelo ever a thing in schools? I thought she was more of a corporate diversity training figure.

  25. 25.

    Kay

    @sab:

    I haven’t looked closely but I could be in a D district (but only if the D wins). My district would actually be more competitive.

  26. 26.

    sab

    @sixthdoctor: I did not learn until college that the Brits burned the White House during the War of 1812 in retaliation for US burning Toronto and devastating the Ontario Penisula in the February the year before. Burned out of their houses in a Canadian winter. Can you even imagine?

    High school history in the US is a joke. We should just tell the kids that. We are teaching you politicized BS. Pump and flush. Learn it for the tests and then forget it. Learn more later on your own ( but not on Facebook.)

  29. 29.

    Steeplejack

    Bob Woodward on Morning Joe now. Blecch. I don’t know why. Any inside dope he has he’s probably saving for his next book.

  30. 30.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    Oh, God, like it matters. School counselors are now “CRT”. They did EXACTLY what they announced they would do at the onset of the panic- they took everything they object to and put it in CRT. “Wrap around” districts are now CRT, although Cincinnati has had a “wraparound” district since 2003. All it means is they align social services with the school district, delivered thru the district.

    CRT inspired. CRT informed. CRT adjacent. Chatted with CRT once at a party.

  32. 32.

    topclimber

    @Kristine: My school did not teach it, but whilst bored in class and in between being a wiseass to our teacher, I would read our history text. Lots of stuff about Jim Crow and labor battles as well. I don’t remember about the tulsa massacre.

    This was before Texas got its de facto veto on school texts, using its big share of the customer base to whip publishers into line.

  33. 33.

    Argiope

    @sab: Condolences.  Despite being re-gerrymandered into an equally Republican district, I may finally be rid of Gym Jordan, which will feel like trading up. However all of Lorain County, until 2020 a reliably blue one, has been put together with a bunch of red ones.  Demographics may have made us less competitive anyway but now we’ll never know.

  39. 39.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @sab: I was history nerd as a kid which drove my high school but the think that struck me about the text books was that there was no history between the American-Mexican War and WWI except for a brief mention of the Civil War.

  40. 40.

    sab

    @Argiope: Good luck with Gym Jordan.

    This may backfire, like it did with DeLay in Texas. He spead the Republicans so thin ( +2 or+3 districts) that he lost his own in the next election. They do tend to over-reach. Oberreach is part of their brand.

  42. 42.

    narya

    I would like to see the Democrats find the parts of kevvie’s speech where he comes out against each of the things that are in the bill that help everyday folks. The ads write themselves, and, since he’s in the position he’s in, it’s fair to say he speaks for all Rs, so you can run it in ANY district.

  43. 43.

    Ken

    @John S.: 64% say the government shouldn’t be involved in Social Security.

    I’m suffering a failure of the imagination. How could you have Social Security without the government being involved in any way? It’s based on a taxing power, and I don’t recall any time when the government ever gave that to —

    Ah, wait, of course, the “letters of marque and reprisal” clause of the Constitution, a.k.a. “How do we have a navy when we can’t afford one”.  Obviously extends to granting a corporation the power to seize 15% of people’s income and invest it for them.

  45. 45.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    And as far as teaching history goes, I think the insistence of teaching WW1 as “American kicked ass, fuck ya” and on to the Great Depression is an even bigger mess. Without WWI nothing in the modern world makes sense.  Civil Right, women’s right, the Middle East, geopolitics, why the US is the dominate power, all of that is because of WW1.

  47. 47.

    Another Scott

    @debbie: I heard a few snippets of FTFNYT’s “The Daily” yesterday.  They ran through some objective numbers on income, etc, but then said that polls of people’s feelings about how things were worse were actually their reality.  And how there was “no contradiction” in saying that feelings (which they helpfully push every day) are a real-er reality.  They were so close to saying that they know that it’s BS, but they have a story to push, reality be damned.

    It’s horrible.

    Oh well, the only way out is through!

    Forward!!

    Cheers,

    Scott.

  48. 48.

    Amir Khalid

    @John S.:
    Don’t you see the danger here? Giving young people the intellectual tools to examine the received beliefs and social values of their society is only going to undermine those beliefs and values, turning the young’uns into Godless progressives!

  49. 49.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    My only memory of HS history is of us “reading around the room.” That is, we opened the text book and each read a paragraph in turn. The teacher was the football coach. This was a small Catholic school in inner city Detroit.

    In contrast, my son had what today would be called a “woke” HS history teacher. They used Howard Zinn as their textbook.

  52. 52.

    topclimber

    @Kay: I remember a theory that gerrymander over-reach can bite the perpetrators in the butt.

    Instead of drawing the lines so that 60% of the residents are GQP in many districts, they get greedy and go for more districts, but this lowers their advantage in many more places to, say, 55%.

    IF our side is allowed to vote, and IF they do, this actually makes it possible to expand Dem delegations.

    Personally I am less concerned about gerrymanders than about them normalizing the ability of state legislatures to reject electoral slates and replace them with RepubliCants (as in, can’t get anything done while in power except repeat their cant). As you know, their game then becomes throw the Presidential election to House, where geography trumps (ugh) population.

    They really want to return to the days when states, not citizens, dictate our federal government. It worked great for them for the first 70 years of our history, so why not again?

    ETA what sab said at #40.

  53. 53.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kristine: My family has lived in this area of Florida for generations. When I was a kid, my grandfather told me what he’d heard growing up about the Rosewood massacre. (He was a small child when it happened.) It was never mentioned in school when I was a kid, even though it was a local event. It is taught in history classes now, so that’s progress. 

  55. 55.

    Peale

    @John S.: it always happens when the stock market goes up and people think they wise and shrewd investors. Why I’d be a bit coin billionaire if the government would just let me tell them where to invest my money.

  56. 56.

    John S.

    @Ken:

    To be fair, I made up those numbers. But I strongly suspect there’s a REAL poll out there with similarly cognitive dissonant results.

  58. 58.

    sixthdoctor

    @sab: Oh yeah, I’m from NJ, and I remember as a kid writing about ol’ Woody because hey! New Jersey! State pride! Let’s go Devils! I had no idea he was an unbelievable POS until the 2010s.

  59. 59.

    John S.

    @Amir Khalid:

    Of course that is the problem with teaching kids to think for themselves. It makes Fox News and other forms of propaganda far more impotent.

    And of course, it makes it so much harder for the top 1% to control the masses. I mean, if people could think critically about issues, they might not vote against their own interests! Or elect useless politicians who do!

    No, we can’t have any of that.

  60. 60.

    Another Scott

    They’re talking and voting on a (standard) motion to recommit (to kill the BBBA by sending it back to a committee) now. About 1/3 have voted. Presumably the final vote will be shortly thereafter.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  61. 61.

    sab

    On the other hand, my POD ( Problems of Democracy) teacher was the baseball coach. He was an excellent teacher in between his seductions of minor students.

  66. 66.

    Steeplejack

    I’m getting the text-only version of tweets on this thread (Win10, Firefox, ad blocker turned off). Page works fine on my Android phone (Brave browser).

    COVID thread was working okay earlier, but when I just refreshed it to check I’m getting text-only tweets there, too.

  67. 67.

    Kristine

    In other news, I learned how to turn off automatic Reader View in iOS Safari and that made me so happy I may just quit while I’m ahead and call it a day.

  69. 69.

    Ken

    @Steeplejack: Can you tell me how to do that?  I would love it if downloading the whole tweet was optional.

    (Remember the bad old days, when home networking was slow and browsers had an option to disable image downloads?)

  71. 71.

    Immanentize

    Actually breaking news — FDA says boosters for all! Pfizer or Moderna after 6 months.  J&J takers should get a second shot of anything after 2 months.

    The winter spread must be looking grim, among other issues….

  73. 73.

    Chris

    @sixthdoctor:

    Same here.  But to be completely fair to myself, I also generally assumed that things in the nature of the Tulsa Race Massacre were happening on a regular basis throughout the U.S. between the 1860s and 1960s, even if I didn’t know any specific ones.

  74. 74.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    I realize this is hard to picture, but there was a 60s dance party here last night. People got into it and dressed up in 60s clothes. The band was great. The young woman who did “Proud Mary” a la Tina Turner was wonderful. I actually got up and boogied with friends.

  75. 75.

    Nelle

    OT here and I posted this in the Covid thread but that may be nearly done for the day:

    I’m curious as to the demographics of the deaths and long covid in the United States.  Has anyone seen any information on this?  And also the effects of the deaths of so many of the elderly on the Social Security and Medicare budgets.  Remember the politician who asked the elderly to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the economy?  Did he get what he wanted?

    I expect that the majority of the deaths are among the elderly, but do we know how many under-18 children have lost a parent?  Or both parents?  (That would impact the Social Security Survivor’s benefits.)

  76. 76.

    NotMax

    As one who taught high school American history for a while, am reaching with both hands deep into the large vat labeled Umbrage and taking two generous handfuls.

    ;)

  77. 77.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: My only memory of HS history is of my teacher standing at the front of the class on the very first day and saying,

    “If all you do is come to class every day you will get a passing grade. I don’t care if you spend the whole time sleeping, you are still guaranteed a D-.”

    I said to myself, “Cool. I can skip this class every day except test days and get at least an A-.” I was a history nerd and there wasn’t anything he was going to teach that I didn’t already know.* So, I skipped all my classes except for test days. I was wrong about the A- tho. Missing pop quizes cost me and I ended up with a B+. The horror.

    I’m not sure of when or how I learned of the Tulsa Race Massacre, but I was fairly young.

    *Which is not to say he didn’t know things he could teach me, I’m sure he did but those were the last things a HS class would ever hear of.

  79. 79.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: This sounds like the polls where people say “I love my public school but those other schools are bad”. People know there are jobs everywhere, they know people’s wages have gone up, but they see the higher price of gasoline every day and when they go to the store some things are somewhat more expensive and some things are hard to find, so they feel like things are not going well. To me that sums up why people are saying this in a nutshell.

  81. 81.

    Chris

    @topclimber:

    Personally I am less concerned about gerrymanders than about them normalizing the ability of state legislatures to reject electoral slates and replace them with RepubliCants

    This.

    In fact, it’s pretty clear at this point that Republicans are moving on to this form of vote suppression precisely because the gerrymandering of the last decade has proved insufficient to the task and still allows too much margin for error.

  82. 82.

    Kay

    @topclimber:

    Oh, I’m worried about the gerrymanders. I’m particularly worried that the some of the gerrymanders are coming in direct defiance of state laws passed by large majorities of the public. That should worry everyone, IMO.

    Ohio is becoming increasingly corrupt. What would have been huge statewide scandals that would lead to the removal of elected officials even 15 years ago now don’t even cause a ripple. The scandal $ record is barely established (“60 milion! Highest ever!”) and there’s another following that beats it.

    In 2006 Ohio had “coingate” which was a GOP scandal that contributed to a Democratic “sweep” that year. The newspaper that broke the scandal won awards. 13 million dollars in public funds at issue.

    “Coingate”, at 13 million, is chump change compared to what’s happened since. I don’t think a 13 million dollar theft would even be news now- maybe a one day story.

  83. 83.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: But as you’ve said, we always knew this was where they were going. They want to make teachers afraid to talk about race in the classroom at all in other than an extremely generic way, because that’s what they’re comfortable with.

  84. 84.

    SFAW

    I hate all these Rethug mofos so fucking much.

    The lot o’ them are Example # 4,173,056 (and counting) of proof that there is no such thing as A Just God.

  85. 85.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @sab: It was more fun than I expected, mostly because two friends dragged me out to dance. (They didn’t even try with Mr DAW who seemed happy where he was, drinking tasting sizes of Singapore Slings and White Russians)

  88. 88.

    Steeplejack

    @Ken:

    I was complaining, not leading up to a how-to!

    There is a way to turn off tweet images, but I have never investigated it. Someone else, possibly Another Scott or NotMax, could give you the details.

    It would be useful if you would reveal your platform and browser, because instructions might vary.

  90. 90.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: Shit, they spent 6 months telling people “no one would work” when we were at basically full employment, so this is just how it is now.

    I’m still hearing this crap even though the unemployment rate here is 2.1%! When I hear older people griping about how “young people don’t want to work” I tell them “You do know that people your age were saying that about you when you were that age, don’t you?”. LOL Everyone thinks things are brand-new just for them. Some of the best employees I’ve worked with here at the City are under 30. They’re great people for the most part who want to do a good job and who have new ideas, which is great in a place like this.

  91. 91.

    SFAW

    @Ken:

    How could you have Social Security without the government being involved in any way?

    The same way the RWMFs keep shrieking “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!!!”

  92. 92.

    Steeplejack

    @Another Scott:

    The graphics are not delayed on my S10e. It’s just a problem (for me) on the desktop site.

    ETA: And now the page has healed itself. Tweet graphics are showing up, although the page is doing that “microloading” thing where it hiccups as each tweet is loaded in succession.

  93. 93.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Soprano2:they see the higher price of gasoline every day

    I paid $3.03 yesterday, which is .20 lower than the last time I noticed (I rarely pay attention to the price of gas. For me it’s like air, I just breath it never noticing the quality of the oxygen)

  94. 94.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Soprano2: A quote from Plato

    “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying.

  95. 95.

    SFAW

    @Soprano2:

    I tell them “You do know that people your age were saying that about you when you were that age, don’t you?”

    Yeah, but it’s TRUE when we old farts say it now, unlike when THOSE OTHER old farts said it when I was younger,

  96. 96.

    Soprano2

    @Kristine: I read “Lies my Teacher Told Me” by James Loewen back in the early 2000’s, which is where I first heard about the race massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They didn’t teach that stuff to us at all at any level, including college.

  98. 98.

    Nelle

    My US history teacher passed out the textbooks and skipped me.  I raised my hand and told him that he missed me and he told me that he actually hadn’t.  He gave me alternative history all year and, while I could hear the version that he had to teach the others, I wasn’t responsible to know any of it.  They read about manifest destiny; I read about the Donner party eating each other up. My big research project was on Blacks in the US military, what they did and how they were treated.   On and on, so my view of American history was always sidewise and from minority points of view.  My teacher was Native American from Oklahoma and he was a wonder.  He gave me permission to love some things about my background without swallowing it all when he said that he had left the church, but oh, how he had loved singing the hymns in his church.

    At the time, I thought it was odd, but I still didn’t question authority much.  I think I was the pet project of two teachers, my 10th grade English teacher, and my 11th grade history teacher, who were very good friends.  Could they take this rather sheltered Mennonite girl who attended this big urban highschool, one which closed for riots from time to time, and turn her into a questioning, challenging person?  Or they saw the level of questioning that I was trying to tamp down and they gave me avenues.

    They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and I’m forever in their debt.

  101. 101.

    Mai Naem mobile

    I am so old I remember when Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy were touted as “The Young Guns” and they had PR pics like they had of “The Outsiders” or “The Untouchables.”

  103. 103.

    Chris

    @Soprano2:

    What’s truly pathetic is when I hear people my age (i.e. other millennials) join in on the same millennial-bashing, as if they’re the only people in their entire generation who’ve ever worked a day in their life.

    I don’t suppose it’s any more common than any other “I’m the only Good One in my group” bullshit, but my God, there are so many born serfs in this fucking country.

  104. 104.

    Skepticat

    I emailed Jared Golden telling him I’m disappointed in his decision to let the perfect be the enemy of the good and that his action was like killing a dog because it has one flea. (Yes, I know my comment won’t make any difference, but I needed to vent.) Perhaps he’s a Manchin/Sinema wannabe. His relatively low-rent district is pretty Chumpy, but Pingree’s district has a lot of unwealthy people with obscenely high property tax bills.

    I’m so old I actually remember when most politicians acted as public servants.

  105. 105.

    Nelle

    @Soprano2: Meanwhile, they are complaining about gas prices while driving bulbous pickup trucks.  I was in an old parking lot last night and could hardly park as the lanes and stalls were crammed with oversized, gas guzzling trucks.  No problem with buying the trucks.  Gimme my cheap gas, dammit.  I’m an American!

  106. 106.

    Soprano2

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Yep, I tell them this too, that it’s been around since ancient times. They still insist “But this time it’s real!” LOL Yeah, your belief about this unlike everyone else in recorded history is real.

  107. 107.

    geg6

    @OzarkHillbilly: ​
     
    Heh. I had a similar experience in high school. During sophomore year, we had a POD/Economics class (one semester of POD and one of Econ), and, after the first week when I corrected the teacher’s “facts” several times, he took me aside after class and said he would just give me the hall pass and I could leave class except for quizzes and test days. I just wandered the halls with my hall pass for fifty minutes so he wouldn’t be embarrassed any more. What an asshole.

  108. 108.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @sab: Word is the Trump admin deliberately undercounted minorities in a lot of places which also makes the GOP assumed margins questionable.

  109. 109.

    Soprano2

    @Nelle: Oh yeah, the parking lot here is full of them! I had one guy tell me yesterday that now it costs him $80 to fill his tank, because his vehicle takes 91 octane gas. My thought, that I didn’t say, was “You should have thought of that before you bought it”. So many of these people bought these huge vehicles when gas was between $1 and $2 here, foolishly thinking it was  never going to go higher. I have a Sonata, I get about 22-24 mpg in the city.

  110. 110.

    Another Scott

    @OzarkHillbilly: It’s usually the case that by the time the press and RWNJs are yelling about it, the peak has passed.  I noticed that the top inflation number on Qevin’s sign last night was car rentals, up 46%.  When J wanted to rent a car months ago when her car was in the shop for 3 weeks, the rate was $660 a week, about 6x normal…

    (We didn’t get the rental.)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  111. 111.

    Soprano2

    @OzarkHillbilly: Gas prices down here have been acting weird for over a year; usually they’re pretty uniform across the city, but for the past year or so they’ve varied by as much as $0.20/gal. I’ve never see that before. Right now it’s between $3.04 and $3.19/gal. The gas tax went up here and no one seems to have noticed it!

  112. 112.

    Geminid

    @Mai Naem mobile: The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee still has it’s “Young Guns” program for candidates in battleground districts. Last year James Oberweis, Lauren Underwood’s challenger, qualified for it. Oberweis was 71 years old

    I think Underwood was 34.

  113. 113.

    L85NJGT

    Thus far this year, the budget deficit has shown signs of improvement as spending rolls over and tax collections have been boosted by asset values.

    Same as it ever was…..

  115. 115.

    PST

    @Another Scott:

    Unemployment has fallen a lot, but there are still millions fewer people working than in the Before Times. There’s still a long way to go in the recovery.

    That’s another way of saying that the size of the labor force, those working plus those seeking employment, has gone down. True, but I am curious how much of the reduction is made up of people whose retirement timing was affected by the pandemic. Anecdote is no substitute for statistics, but I know I retired a little earlier than I intended and so did several of my friends. We’re in our late 60s now and unlikely to dive back into the labor pool. Almost everyone leaves the labor force sometime before dying, and the timing decisions of millions of people to retire a couple of years earlier than planned will suppress the size of the labor force for a few years almost regardless of economic conditions. It will gradually fade as we get older and are replaced by younger people whose decisions were not affected by an earth-shattering event.

  118. 118.

    Another Scott

    They’ve got about 5 more minutes in the official time for voting on the BBBA final passage.  Sausage soon!

    Exciting!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  119. 119.

    VOR

    @John S.:  Critical Thinking Skills were banned in Texas. Not a joke, the 2012 Texas Republican platform said:

    We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority

    They have updated with the times. The 2020 Texas Republican platform says:

    “We reject Critical Race Theory as a post-Marxist ideology that seeks to undermine the system of law and order itself and to reduce individuals to their group identity alone. We support legislation to remove this ideology from government programs, including education involving race, discrimination, and racial awareness.”

  120. 120.

    Geminid

    @Skepticat: Jared Golden’s ME-2nd District was one of the few across the country where there was consequential ticket splitting. He won reelection even though trump carried the district and it’s electoral vote. And Republican Rob Wittman won reelection in the VA-1st while Joe Biden carried it.

    I believe there was a Nebraska District that Joe Biden carried while the Democratic Congressional candidate lost. Like Maine, Nebraska has electors chosen according to results in each district, so Biden picked one up there.

  123. 123.

    VOR

    @Soprano2: It was obvious to anyone who spent any time thinking that gas prices would go up once economic activity picked up. Supply and demand: economic activity = greater demand, so if supply doesn’t grow then prices go up.

  124. 124.

    Another Scott

    @PST: There could indeed be some confounding factors – Boomers retiring, Covid stopping immigration, etc.  Time will tell.  But the October number is about the same as Jan-Feb 2018 – that’s a big change (we probably should expect the workforce to continue to expand even with retirements because of population growth and immigration) and shows that we aren’t really at “full employment” in the normal meaning of the term.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  125. 125.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @geg6: In my case the teacher was just a year or 2 from retirement and just didn’t want to deal with bullshit anymore. It was the baby boomer years and they were installing double wides to come up with enough class rooms for all the students coming thru and I’m pretty sure the teachers were instructed to move ’em thru if it was at all possible.

    Which was fine with me, I was bored to tears.

  127. 127.

    debbie

    @sixthdoctor:

    I’ll tell you how bad it was. I was in 9th or 10th grade when I decided when I grew up, I wanted to write history books that weren’t whitewashed. That’s how obvious the bias was!

  128. 128.

    Steeplejack

    NBC News: Earlier during his floor speech, Republican Kevin McCarthy said: “Abigail Spanbgerger said nobody elected Biden to be FDR.”

    From the back, Rep. @AOC yelled, “I did.”@NBCNews

    — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 19, 2021

  129. 129.

    delk

    @Geminid: how many campaigns does Oberweis have to lose before it finally sinks into his head that nobody wants him in any elected office? I guess we should be grateful that he’s wasting his money on losing and not bankrolling more viable candidates.

  130. 130.

    BC in Illinois

    So Kevin McCarthy did an 8-hour stunt last night. I missed it.

    I got up at 3am to see a partial eclipse of the moon– and that was exciting. Clear sky, red moon, just to the right of Orion. A better use of my time.

  131. 131.

    germy

    @debbie:

    I recently read the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

    It’s an unfortunate title because the theme really is lies my textbooks told me.

    It’s a fascinating examination of what goes into (and gets left out of) textbook production.

  132. 132.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Another Scott: My wife’s car blew the tranny about a month ago. (It’s been a long long nightmare I won’t bore you with the details) A couple times, usually right after she’s gotten home driving my truck which she hates, she has proposed renting a car. I kept telling her “We don’t need to. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass, but the money saved makes up for it.” Fortunately, she finally gets her car back next week and we won’t “argue” over that anymore.

    @Soprano2: I know people who look for the cheapest gas they can find, obsessing over every gas sign they spot. Sometimes they will drive 20 miles just to knock a nickel off the gallon price. I just can’t.

  134. 134.

    Geminid

    @delk: Oberweis almost edged out Underwood. She only took a lead 3-4 days into counting absentee ballots. I think her winning margin was less than 5,000 votes.

    Losing Underwood would have been a real loss for the Democratic party. Interestingly, Underwood has not affiliated with any of the three  “ideological” caucuses among House Democrats.

  139. 139.

    Omnes Omnibus

    FWIW I had an American History teacher in high school who was willing to talk about the fact that Social Darwinism was basically an excuse to keep brown people from getting equal rights. This would have been the ’79-’80 school year.

  140. 140.

    Chris Johnson

    @Soprano2: I have a hotrodded Subaru Impreza. It’s the 2 liter engine from 2014, with a CVT for the transmission. I’ve got an air intake on it, have deleted the resonator on the exhaust and I’m looking to do a hotrod muffler (a Borla, straight-through pipe for better airflow, with muffler space around the holes in the pipe). I have a lighter crank pulley so it revs up faster, and I have ‘street’ coilover springs to tighten up the suspension. And I’ve got a bunch of ‘airtab’ airflow things to streamline it more at high speeds, which look kind of racey and would indeed stabilize it if it was racing.

    Because some of this hotrodding improves the efficiency of the engine or aerodynamics and none of it actually hurts that, or delivers stuff like downforce or increased fuel consumption for raw acceleration, it gives me a slightly ‘zippy’ and very sporty-feeling car while I also get over 30 mpg across ALL my driving. On long trips over the right terrain I can get over 50 mpg for a few hundred miles or so, if I don’t have to make a lot of stops :)

    Until we’re all electric, I like hotrodding ICE cars in such a way that they burn less gas per mile. It’s not actually that hard to do :)

  141. 141.

    Jager

    @Another Scott:

    The rental companies unloaded all their cars last year when travel was down. A couple of months ago I had my car in the shop overnight. I know the dealer, he gave me the dealership rental rate from Enterprise, $44 a day for the world’s smallest Kia. That’s up about 100%. With tax and other BS charges, it cost me 53 bucks for 14 hours.

  143. 143.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Jager: I rented a car last month while my car was having brake work done and I got a new Jetta for about the price you payed.  Nice car, but I was still still happy to get the Saab back.

  144. 144.

    H.E.Wolf

    @rikyrah: ​Chicago Tribune (@chicagotribune) tweeted at 7:00 AM on Fri, Nov 19, 2021:
    Republicans in Wisconsin are engaged in an all-out assault on the state’s election infrastructure.
     That’s one of the many reasons I’m glad of our BJ fundraisers for Four Directions (and earlier this year, Voces de la Frontera). Paraphrasing a wise comment from Kay: it’s smart to fund groups who know their locality and their local voters.

    And it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness….

  145. 145.

    NotMax

    @Jager

    This. Dumped the fleets faster than lightning. When switched gears to restocking, ran smack into the automotive supply chain delays.

  151. 151.

    Mousebumples

    @Omnes Omnibus: 100% yes. Here’s hoping our contributions to Voces and Four Directions helps keep him in the governor’s mansion. (and hopefully send Ron Johnson back to meddle in his wife’s family’s business full time)

  152. 152.

    Edmund Dantes

    @Miss Bianca: having grown up and lived in his district for 20 years or so. He was given a oss by pelosi and took it. The 2nd is North Alabama in a lot of ways. “Keep your government hands off our Medicare” “we are self sufficient live off the land” types that don’t realize how much of their rural life is made possible by unseen government subsidies. And the place is is Lily white.

    Golden and Pelosi know what they are doing letting him vote this way. Just like she did when she gave the Squad the pass on the BIF.

    There were a ton more confederate flags growing up there than you would suspect for the home of the ME 20th and Joshua Chamberlain.

  156. 156.

    topclimber

    @Omnes Omnibus: In those ancient days, a lot of folks understood that social Darwinism was kind of how the Nazis ran.

    Ah, those days when anti-Fascists could be found in the Republican Party.

  158. 158.

    Soprano2

    @VOR: Yep, it’s interesting to me how people who claim to worship the free market complain when it works the way it’s supposed to.

  159. 159.

    PST

    @Nelle: That was inspiring to read. I’m sure lots of us enjoyed the comment and relate to it as well — some of us saying we had a similar experience, others wishing we had. I hope it is not presumptuous to observe that it has within it the seed of a longer essay that might reach more people.

  160. 160.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @sab:  But we certainly buff up Woodrow Wilson in a way that he did not deserve. Racist POS with an I am Christ complex.

    Yes, and that pseudo intellectual Lost Cause populism the GOP is embraced is out of that era too.

  162. 162.

    Steeplejack

    @WaterGirl:

    The latest version of Windows Firefox (94.0.1) is a couple of weeks old. This is new today, and it’s happening intermittently. Didn’t happen on this latest refresh, in fact. But I just refreshed the COVID thread and it did happen there.
    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  163. 163.

    Kristine

    @WaterGirl: It converts webpages to all text. It does cut out graphics and ads, but it also deletes formatting so that things like intros and quote blocks run together–you don’t realize that you’re reading different sections/paragraphs. It’s really annoying.

  164. 164.

    Miss Bianca

    @Edmund Dantes: I suspected as much. Rural Maine, from my experience, is much like rural Colorado in that their fantasies of “rugged individuals living off the land in a ruggedly individualistic way with no dadburned government help” are totally propped up by federal government programs.

  166. 166.

    Soprano2

    @OzarkHillbilly: I’m lucky, a place close to my house and my work has the cheapest gas in the city! But yeah, if I need gas and I’m somewhere else I just buy it, I figure it all evens out in the end.

  168. 168.

    PST

    @Another Scott: I don’t think we really disagree. The U-6 unemployment rate is still a little higher than it could be. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the picture we tend to have is that the difference between U-3 and U-6 represents a lot of “discouraged workers” who have given up after months or years of trying to find a job. My suspicion is that this is a less accurate picture than usual, because the recent upheaval has caused many to change their life plans, either leaving the labor force willingly, when they otherwise might not have, or taking a pause to reconsider their life goals and prepare to strike out in a different direction. The same low unemployment that makes it easier to find a job these days makes it easier to take a risk. There is less pressure to hang on like grim death to what you have.

  172. 172.

    Skepticat

    @Edmund Dantes: Or perhaps he’s just imitating our Rethuglican senator, Collins, who loves to vote for show if her vote won’t change the outcome. I really think he’s enamoured of Manchin.

  173. 173.

    Bill Arnold

    @John S.:
    Please do not present fake numbers as real, without any tag. I’m keeping you pied for a while because I remember numbers, even fake numbers.

  174. 174.

    J R in WV

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: ​
     

    We went to see Tine Turner at the local Civic Center, with a huge crowd, the AA community was dressed to the 9s, suits, dresses with corsages, hats. Was a great show, she was/is a great and gifted performer. Don’t specifically recall “Proud Mary” but it was a huge hit for her, so can’t imagine she didn’t do it.

    She had to be in her late 50s, yet danced like a youngster. Beautiful woman with pipes superior to most famous singers I have seen. A great show ~!!~ Glad she had retired to a place where she is respected and doesn’t have to worry about red necks trying to repeate Jim Crow. Also rich AND famous in Switzerland. Makes me jealous.

  176. 176.

    WaterGirl

    @John S.:  Glad to know where you were coming from.

    That’s where the // after your made-up thing is handy.

    adding “, probably” at the end of the sentence like some people do makes it obvious, too.

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