12? That seems significant, and I'd bet on Fox News actually having the whip count right.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) July 2, 2025 at 10:37 AM
—-
Also, notable that Harris got on Newsmax or similar today and said "yeah 4th of July isn't probably happening"
I guess I'll currently believe it when I see it – I expect Johnson to jam his caucus and them to fold.— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) July 2, 2025 at 10:39 AM
===
HOUSE UPDATE: The procedural vote to advance the Senate-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act is stuck at 204-212 and is being kept open.
16 Republicans haven't voted.
Democrats have full attendance (something they've struggled with all year) and are unanimously voting no.— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) July 2, 2025 at 1:54 PM
===
A bunch of House Republican holdouts just voted yes. They have the votes to move forward. Again, this is just the procedural vote, not on passage of the bill.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) July 2, 2025 at 2:09 PM
===
MEANWHILE: House Freedom Caucus leaders are circulating this document torching the Senate-passed "big beautiful bill." They say it increases deficits and contains insufficient clean energy cuts, inadequate Medicaid rules, "excessive port for Alaska and Hawaii," among other grievances.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) July 2, 2025 at 1:00 PM
===
Thanks to Senate Republicans, 17 million people will lose their health care.
Thanks to Senate Republicans, three million Americans, including veterans and seniors, will lose food assistance.
Thanks to Senate Republicans, families will see their energy bills go up by $400 a year.— Kamala Harris (@kamalaharris.com) July 1, 2025 at 2:16 PM
—
Senate Republicans are doing all of this and more — hurting working people across our nation — in order to pay for $1 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.
There is still time to stop this bill before it passes in the House. Call 202-224-3121 and tell your representative to vote no.— Kamala Harris (@kamalaharris.com) July 1, 2025 at 2:16 PM
===
Jeffries is now naming and shaming House Republicans in swing districts and citing figures of how many of their constituents will lose healthcare and food assistance
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 2, 2025 at 10:25 AM
===
I think some people might be a bit confused at my optimism in terms of the fallout of the murder bill and I simply cannot emphasize enough how the people whose lives most depend on the infrastructure this bill specifically is gutting voted for Trump by like 30 points.
— the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) (@merovingians.bsky.social) July 1, 2025 at 9:39 PM
and it’s not a ‘my life gets shittier’ thing, it’s a ‘rural hospitals closing is a death sentence for entire communities’ thing
like it’s grim as hell and there are certainly Dem voters in the firing line here but statistically Evil BBB is taking Obama-Trump voters and feeding them through a woodchipper
rural and exurban life is not sustainable. it has persisted despite the decimation of the industry that put people out there in the first place because when you got sick there was a hospital depending on medicaid cost sharing. as the population grows older, this of course only gets worse
yeah we don't need the car dealership owners to turn on him and more importantly, the GOP (there will be a LOT of Good Tsar Bad Boyars in the next decade), we need their customers living under their little fiefdom bsky.app/profile/jake…
— the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) (@merovingians.bsky.social) July 1, 2025 at 9:46 PM
for those lacking basic reading comprehension including certain hack journalists: bsky.app/profile/mero…
— the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) (@merovingians.bsky.social) July 1, 2025 at 11:39 PM
===
trumpism as peronism but only because he seems himself as evita
— QuoProQuid (@quoproquid.bsky.social) July 1, 2025 at 5:28 PM
How About Some Great News?
Shalimar
Fuck Alaska. Still think the House is going to save your horrible vote by “improving” the bill, Murkowski? They will take out all the shit you negotiated for your vote.
NotMax
Are there cumbers with cojones enough to interrupt House business with a motion to vacate the chair? My understanding is that takes priority while all other business grinds to a halt.
NotMax
#2:
cumbers = numbers
JCJ
@NotMax: I thought you were asking about cucumbers.
NotMax
@JCJ
Too early for B-J After Dark.
:)
Steve LaBonne
@JCJ: Which are more intelligent and all around far more worthwhile than Republicans.
Chetan Murthy
@JCJ: Cucumbers …. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAargSCXQaQ
VFX Lurker
I voted for harm reduction last November. I lost to those who voted for more harm.
Now I just hope to survive this, and I hope no one I care about gets harmed.
Hunter Gathers
Josh Marshall articulating what has been bouncing around in my head for a while, now.
Harrison Wesley
Kinda sucks. The lemmings are breaking through the last barrier and racing to follow Swino the Oaf King off the cliff.
hells littlest angel
@NotMax: I assumed “cumbers with cojones” was just some new, social-media-originated slang term that will become passé before I get a chance to look it up.
Jay
@Hunter Gathers:
Toss in the ICE budget increase, and yes, they are coming for you.
Laura Loomer made it clear today. She twitted that the Admin was going after the 65 million “illegals” in the US.
There aren’t 65 million “illegals” in the US.
There are how ever, 65 million Latinos.
Baud
@VFX Lurker:
Same.
Belafon
@Harrison Wesley: Which is a fitting analogy in that it was Disney that actually herded the lemmings to and off the cliff.
Belafon
@Jay: Some of whom come from families that have been in areas that are now Texas since before Texas was Texas.
Harrison Wesley
@Belafon: If they could just leave the rest of us alone….
Jay
@Belafon: and Arizona, New Mexico, California, Florida and Colorado.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
And yet I just read something today that suggested approval for Democrats in Congress is going down. It’s just insane. Why is it that whenever they do shitty things, people get mad at our party? How do we get these people to live in the real world?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Shalimar: then I think the gop loses her vote. We shall see
Belafon
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: When Democrats are in charge, the headlines mention Democrats. When Republicans are in charge, the headlines mention Congress. We’re gonna have to wait until people have no choice but to pay attention.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@hells littlest angel: me too.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Jay: Nevada too.
dm
Since most of the pain-points are delayed by one to four years I worry that we’re going to see a lot of “the Dems were crying wolf” about the implications of this bill before the leopards start to bite.
dm
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Some of that may be habitual “they’re letting the Republicans get away with murder instead of employing magic fairy dust to stop them”.
Though I have to admit to a certain frustration with Democratic Congressmember fecklessness, myself .
Hunter Gathers
@dm: The companies that run rural health services have low profit margins. A 20% cut to Medicaid payments shuts a lot of them down.
This bill passes, a whole lot of rural hospitals and nursing homes are going to announce by the end of the year that they are closing their doors by the first quarter of 2027. You’ll have until then to go get Grandma.
Betty Cracker
I gotta think they’ll jam this shit-sandwich of a bill through one way or another, but it’s hard to see how they’ll avoid reaping the whirlwind. Did y’all see the latest jobs report? They were expecting a gain of around +100K and got -33K instead.
Looks like the economy is going into the shitter at the same time the GOP swine in Congress shred the social safety net to give unneeded tax breaks to billionaires AND explode the debt. All while the so-called billionaire POTUS is openly selling access to his own rancid old hide and assorted other billionaires are flaunting their obscene wealth and sucking up to Trump.
Trump cultists voters won’t abandon Orange Jeebus, but they aren’t a majority. It backfired when Trump bullied Tillis into retirement, and though the senate map is favorable for the GOP swine this year, maybe it’s not a lock for them if this bill blows up in their faces badly.
As much as I hate hearing this piece of shit legislation called the “Big Beautiful Bill,” it indelibly brands it as a Trump product. And people fucking hate it.
Jay
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Knew I missed at least one.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
As always, the question is whether they hate us more.
TONYG
@Shalimar: Excessive port. An expected wine reference.
JML
Let’s bring this phrase back. “GOP swine” Perfectly descriptive
JCJ
@Chetan Murthy: that was good!
Baud
@JML:
It does have a nice ring.
TONYG
@Hunter Gathers: The assholes who live in those rural areas will blame the death of Grandma on Mexicans and transgender people. These fucks are too stupid to learn. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
chemiclord
I kinda love how the discussion is around how the “third way” guys need to be ejected from the party.
Good luck getting the majority you need without them, clowns.
Baud
@chemiclord:
I don’t know what precipitated that comment, but I’ve long felt that the core problem with the Democratic Party is that it has too many people.
Jay
@dm:
The Leopards will start to bite hard where most people will notice it, shortly after the passage of the OBBB.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/06/30/making-america-gross-again-big-fugly-bill-hits-the-senate-floor/
Hospitals, Extended Care and Old Age Homes just don’t up and close. They wind down, a multi year process. They start by cutting budgets, staff, services, closing departments and selling off equipment while it still has some value. This is done to stretch out the money, to either protect critical services, or in the case of For Profits, to protect the profitable services.
And that is just in one sector. Other sectors will do the same.
The youtube channel US Retail Check has a bunch of video’s up on the effects of tariffs and other acts on everything from supply chains, transportation, tourism, international shipping to ag, basically, everybody is moving away from trade being US centric.
OBBB will accelerate these changes and create new changes.
Hunter Gathers
@Baud: If people did not trust the evidence put in front of them, then how is the divorce rate so high?
‘I trusted that SOB and he betrayed me. I will hate him and his flunky friends forever.’
A lot of his voters do not for a second think that they voted for this, despite what he said. He IS breaking his trust with a lot of his voters.
Will most of them turn on him? Of course not. 75% of Hoover’s voters stuck with him in 1932 and he got his ass handed to him.
15% breaks a lot of gerrymanders and changes how the Senate looks.
TONYG
When I’m appointed as emperor (I don’t know why it hasn’t happened yet) I’ll have electric shock collars installed on all news “correspondents” (including those on NPR). Given them a big shock if they say the words “Republican deficit hawks”. There are no such people in existence. “Deficit hawks” never want to raise taxes on the rich; they only want to cut spending that benefits the rest of us. An Orwellian phrase.
Shalimar
@TONYG: like this dumbass: Detained under Trump’s immigration policies, Danish immigrant blames Biden—and still supports Trump
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Shalimar:
Entitled white dude from a basically all-white country with a shitty, racist history vis a vis immigration is now bitching about how an immigrant trying to permanently get into a country defacto ruled by whites with a racist history vis a vis immigration is rich.
Added bonus is he can’t vote.
Baud
TONYG
@Betty Cracker: I don’t know. I wonder whether there are any “conservatives” out there who are NOT Trump cultists. I know a few people who started out as garden-variety Republicans (bad enough) who mutated into Trump cultists about ten years ago. It’s like the way that old-school conservative Germans fell into line to support Hitler. (Although, somehow, by late May of 1945 nobody supported Hitler anymore.)
Jay
@Shalimar:
There are still dumbasses who want Obama Care cut, because they are either to dumb, or too ignorant to know it’s the ACA they are insured under. Ditto for people on their State’s Medicaid, which because the program has a different name, don’t realize it’s the Federal Medicaid, which they still want cut.
TONYG
@Shalimar: A DANISH immigrant??? Why would someone move from Denmark to this shit-hole country in the first place? I’ve never had a high opinion of the intelligence of the “average person”, but the past ten years have been below my lowest expectations.
Chief Oshkosh
@TONYG: My direct experience with the common country boys and girls going back six decades supports your statement. Remember, these are people who think that all those cable shows about Bigfoot and aliens (the kind from outer space) are factual documentaries. These are people who firmly believe that the Covid virus was developed by NIH or CDC or whoever the MAGA leaders tell them. They will absolutely blame Democrats when hospitals and old folks homes shut down. They are entirely incapable of thinking otherwise; at this point, it’s reflexive.
Juju
@JML: It’s an insult to swine.
TONYG
@Jay: That’s an interesting and important point. An example of the phrase about things falling apart gradually and then all at once.
Jay
@TONYG:
There are a bunch who aren’t in the Cult in the House and Senate, but they are too gutless to stand up to DJTdiot, out of fear of being primaried, and armed MAGgots. Few of them will ever get a gig as sweet and easy as the one they have now, and if they go against DJTdiot, even wingnut welfare will be a reach. It’s not like they can substack or podcast their way out of early retirement.
cain
@Hunter Gathers:
And good luck trying to spin them back up once those companies disappear. Oh wait. Looks like private equity firms can buy them !
AWOL
@JML: Rhymes with “Ayn, ” their Randian goddess and ubersadist. We’re living in the world Ayn Rand wanted.
TONYG
@Hunter Gathers: That’s a good point. I’m genuinely curious about the “logic” that people followed when voting for Trump, but I’m not in a position to ask those people about it without causing drama in my life that I don’t need. I enjoy a spirited debate with intelligent people who have differing viewpoints — but, as far as I’m concerned, any Trump voter is a fucking idiot, and it would be a waste of time to talk to them about it.
cain
@TONYG: they will blame them for not working the fields while their lives are in danger.
rikyrah
@VFX Lurker:
This is me.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I could be wrong, but I suspect the swing voters who decide most elections don’t care enough about either party to hate its members.
They Call Me Noni
@Hunter Gathers: I have those same concerns. Told Mr. N and the oldest daughter last night that I cannot prove my citizenship. I wasn’t born in the USofA. I was born in Munich, Germany where my dad was stationed (Army), but my birth wasn’t registered with the American Consulate and my birth certificate is in Geman. My mother does not have a birth certificate with a raised seal because she was illegitimate and back then that was a real stain so no raised seal on your birth certificate which Mom told me makes her “unofficial” according to the state of New York back in 1941. Don’t have my father’s birth certificate. Have lots of official Army papers and records, but not a birth certificate. He was a lifer (until he was killed while serving) but you don’t have to be a citizen to serve. I would imagine that there are millions of folks who have lived here their whole lives with similar stories. Can’t prove your parents were citizens.
What a fucking mess this country has become. Laws, rules and norms mean nothing. We are third world. We are the country that we used to send aid to and monitor their elections.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@cain: and loot each hospital down to one, old, rusted bed pan while making them “rent” their own property that private equity “liberated” from underneath the hospital.
JML
@Juju: almost certainly, but comparing these GOP congressional scum to anything is an insult to what we compare them to.
GOP swine just has a nice, almost classic ring to it.
(I seem to recall Hunter S. Thompson using it more than a few times…Nixonian swine? feel like I’ve heard that before)
TONYG
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Ha ha. True confession: I’ve only travelled to Europe once (France in 1979). That being the case, I have a gauzy view of Western Europe (especially the Scandinavian countries) as sort of a hippie paradise of creativity and enlightenment. My son, in contrast, who is a world traveller, tells me that some the worst racist assholes that he’s ever met were in Western Europe.
They Call Me Noni
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Pulling the plug on Fox would be a good start.
TONYG
@Jay: That business of individual states renaming Medicaid cracks me up. A crude way of state government “leaders” getting credit for a federal program. Now that will be destroyed along with the rest of Medicaid.
They Call Me Noni
@Belafon: And Maine. Wasn’t it part of Canada?
Betty Cracker
@Jay: My current House rep is like that, a second-gen lawmaker who has coasted on his father’s name his entire life. He went along with the Trump bullshit to keep his job, so now he lies full time about what’s in the current bill. I called the sumbitch this morning, not that it will do any good.
Matt McIrvin
@Hunter Gathers: Right. I’ve been saying it too for a while. Trump’s EO on birthright citizenship only affects newly born kids. But if we take the principle seriously, he’s reserving the right to personally define citizenship for everyone. Everyone. You are a citizen only if Donald Trump says so, because we have no way of proving that your ancestors were citizens or were here legally going back to some well-attested event.
cain
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Sounds about right.
They will be on the hunt for these hospitals to purchase and then will talk to their GOP buddies to get funding too. This way the GOP will look like they ✌️ fixed ✌️ the problem while also raising prices and blame Dems for the high prices.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Betty Cracker: I worry food shortages are coming too since farmers are having difficulty getting folks to pick their crops which will shortly rot in the fields.
When we cannot find fresh fruits or veggies anywhere, remember to thank ICE for screwing everybody so they could cosplay as masked thugs for Fox News.
scav
@TONYG: On the upside, we’re at least rid of one solid Trump voter.
Jay
@cain:
Of the 50 rural hospitals that have closed in the last decade, 39 were For Profit hospitals, owned and operated by Medical Corporations that had/have multiple Hospitals, Clinics, Labs, etc.
They were closed because there is not enough profit, or no profit in Rural Health care.
Private Equity is not going to touch those with a 20 foot pole. Even the land and the buildings aren’t worth buying. These are the same places where Walmarts have closed because there is no money in it. Since January 2025, 50,000 farms have closed in the US.
cain
@Matt McIrvin:
If your Hispanic you are not a citizen. Harder to do that with black folks but I am sure he will try
HopefullyNotcassandra
@cain: It is likely the hospitals will go bankrupt quickly having paid everything for the right to be looted.
cain
@Jay:
I’m assuming they are going to get free money from the feds while operating with zero budget
Betty Cracker
I shared the “Southern men” video WG posted last night with my sister, and then we divided up a list of redneck relatives to send it to between us and texted the YouTube version to them. (We figure they aren’t on TikTok.) Fourth of July gonna be LIT! ;-)
Matt McIrvin
@They Call Me Noni: Maine was part of Massachusetts, though there were some quibbles over the northern border.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Jay: private equity is and has bought rural hospitals though. At least 130 rural hospitals are currently controlled by private equity.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/finance/new-report-private-equity-stakeholder-project-ownership-rural-healthcare
https://pestakeholder.org/news/new-data-reveals-extent-of-pe-ownership-of-rural-hospitals/
Hospital equipment is not cheap.
Jay
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
They are burning unharvested wheat fields and rice fields in Texas. Nobody to bring in the harvest, no markets. And Texas isn’t the only place. Washington had most of their cherry crop lost, again, no Ag workers, no markets. Arizona, ditto, Iowa, ditto plus corn smut, Nebraska, ditto, California and Florida as well.
Joy in FL
@Betty Cracker: I just called that same rep a few minutes ago. And twice yesterday and last Friday and Saturday. What you said about him is so true.
They Call Me Noni
@Betty Cracker: Oh to be a fly on the wall!!
Captain C
@Betty Cracker:
That seems like the opposite of all the Biden reports: expecting, say, 100K and getting, say, 250K.
chemiclord
@TONYG: You ain’t seen casual racism until you’ve seen French or Italian hooligans throwing bananas at black players on the pitch.
They Call Me Noni
@Matt McIrvin: Oh. Thank you.
Betty Cracker
@Joy in FL: He’s a careerist scumbag, so calling him feels pointless, but I think we did right to try.
eclare
@Belafon:
Yeah. Eva Longoria said her family never moved, but it had switched from Mexican to US citizenship and back something like five times in the past several hundred years.
rikyrah
@Jay:
lips so pursed
HopefullyNotcassandra
@TONYG: some states set up their own health exchange and named it accordingly. Obamacare allowed states to do that or to use the exchange the federal government created. So, for example, Kentucky set up their own health Kynect Exchange with its own homegrown Kentuckian navigators. California set up Covered California. Massachusetts set up the Massachusetts Health Care Connector before Obamacare/ACA existed.
Jay
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Private Equity and Corporations started buying rural hospitals before the ACA and Medicare and Medicaid expansion started. There was good money in “Rick Scotting” the margins, enough to cheat, not enough to get caught. Since then they have been closing rural hospitals.
Right now, and for the past two years, Private Equity and Corporations have been chasing Vet Clinics. More money, more profit.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
Once again….
HE INHERITED THE BEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD FROM BIDEN
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Jay: I didn’t know the crops were being burned. People are still trying to harvest in California.
Captain C
@cain: If it goes to SCROTUS, Alito will cite Dred Scott to make the case that Black folks aren’t citizens. Thomas might sign on to this opinion, which will hopefully be the dissent.
Captain C
@Jay:
Did not know corn was into that sort of thing. Or is this pervy humans?
gvg
@cain: Hmm…how do we create a real national healthcare? Emergency repair? Then repair the repair and make it a little better a decade at a time?
Sigh, I know thats too much to hope for but I don’t want to doom too much.
rikyrah
Chris D. Jackson
@ChrisDJackson
We told folks during the election that the corporate media was intentionally sandbagging Biden to boost Trump—for clicks, chaos, and profit.
Now the receipts are rolling in. They knew exactly what they were doing.
This wasn’t journalism. It was total capitulation. And democracy is paying the price.
https://x.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1940425071559889300
HopefullyNotcassandra
@cain: Jay is right that private equity will shut the hospitals down.
Medicine isn’t a business. We need to get back to treating it like the necessary profession it is before we find we only have MD’s who can inject silicone fillers and perform cosmetology procedures. This bill goes in the opposite direction making it even harder, and more expensive, for would be doctors to pay for medical school.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Oh, why doesn’t he just shut up and go away? //
Jeffro
the radio in my head started playing “Everybody Knows” by Leonard Cohen after reading that sentence
Trollhattan
@rikyrah:
These are the same math wizards claiming Trump has prevented 250 million American fentanyl deaths.
I think they really mean one guy would have died 250 million times, but whatevs, right?
Trollhattan
@Captain C:
It’s a Mike Johnson thang. Also Chuck Grassley.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@TONYG: that should go down as the lie of this and the last century.
Who balanced the budget? Democrats under Bill Clinton
Who trickled up the deficit and debt sky high in the first place? Why Ronald Reagan did, that’s who.
Who said hold my beer, our deficit and debt need to grow? Why George W Bush and his gop crew did, that’s who.
Who is back again to blow up our deficit and debt and this time sabotage the dollar too (tariffs)? Why Donald Trump, that’s the man who is trying to run our debts and deficits so high the bond market may just skedaddle.
When does our debt shrink? When democrats are in control, that is when our debts shrink, our economy grows and everything gets just a little bit better.
eclare
@TONYG:
Yeah I’ve seen enough international soccer matches to disabuse me of that opinion. I remember one in particular involving racist Danish fans.
JWR
Considering how close we are to July 4th, it sure has been quiet ’round these parts. It usually sounds like a battle zone by now.
TONYG
@Chief Oshkosh: Yes. It’s not an accident that a high percentage of Trump’s cult are Evangelical Christians. The stupidest people in the country were ready to transfer their allegiance to a new “leader”.
Jeffro
(for the Daily Double): “Whose picture is next to ‘self-hating complex’ in the psychological textbooks?”, Alex
Matt McIrvin
@They Call Me Noni: It’s odd, since Massachusetts was in two non-contiguous pieces with the New Hampshire seacoast in the middle. Comes from some complicated 17th-century colonial history.
Jeffro
145%
I need 100,000 side-by-side reports and news stories out there to help get it across to the oh-so-short-memoried public, though.
seriously!
“Biden’s economy was this; trump’s is that.
Biden, this; trump, that.”
Unemployment rates…grocery prices…gas prices…the dollar…ALL of it.
Every five minutes, around the clock, until 2029.
rikyrah
Jazz the Professor (@Jazzieeiswhoiam) posted at 2:09 PM on Wed, Jul 02, 2025:
#OTD Jul 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. It outlawed discrimination in public accommodations such as restaurants and hotels, and in federally funded programs. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was also a landmark piece of legislation in the U.S., primarily focused on protecting voting rights for African Americans. It was the 1st major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The passage of these Acts, however, did not come without vigorous opposition. In 1957, whites in Albany, GA, were interviewed and asked what they thought of the Civil Rights Act.
Here are their responses…
#History #KnowYourHistory
https://t.co/j5rvO5zjex
(https://x.com/Jazzieeiswhoiam/status/1940488104915111975?t=Kc46rrfOd0EZTjIB7YG4bQ&s=03)
Jeffro
This is exactly right, and should be pounded home daily. HOURLY.
As a bonus, we can all ask our RWNJ relatives exactly how they know they can prove that they are citizens…and watch them squirm when they can’t. Or better yet, pounce when they allude to how their skin tone will save them.
eclare
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
I work in tax. The Internal Revenue Code doubled in size under Reagan. I still remember a retired partner coming into the office to say hi to people. He took one look at the code and said, “when did it start coming in two volumes?”
hueyplong
@eclare: As someone who watches sports a whole lot more than pretty much anyone else here, I have the credibility to point out that no country’s best and brightest are sports fanatics. You can be so stupid that you need help dressing yourself and yet you can be Jason from East Bumblefuck on sportstalk radio or otherwise on the internet spouting “opinions” as though they make the least bit of sense.
Other than maybe The Simpsons, the first thing Fox did was hijack major team sports (i.e., the NFL, followed by MLB) in the 1980s. One thing racist sports fans agree on is their disdain for the NBA. To my knowledge, Fox has never made a play for the NBA. I do not see that as coincidental.
rikyrah
Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) posted at 2:58 PM on Wed, Jul 02, 2025:
JUST IN: Edward Kelley, a pardoned Jan. 6 defendant, gets life in prison for plotting to assassinate the FBI agents and police who investigated him.
He contended Trump’s pardon extended to these crimes as well but DOJ opposed and court denied.
https://t.co/ynEl4XASRl https://t.co/Z4kVT1VEd0
(https://x.com/kyledcheney/status/1940500344213328108?t=FFNG06KYJhpqOxuyLGsGhw&s=03)
rikyrah
(((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) posted at 10:29 AM on Wed, Jul 02, 2025:
Re: Mamdani & Israel, Democrats are longer pro-Israeli when it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Dems sympathized more with Israelis by 13 pt in 2017. Now, it’s Palestinians by 43 pt.
Among Dems under 50, it was Israelis by 14 pt in 2017. Now, Palestinians by 57 pt. https://t.co/AfGop8UHTF
(https://x.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1940432541556818166?t=fNlQwICuVD0oOX6NjopAtQ&s=03)
TONYG
@Jay: That’s a good point about the “armed MAGgots”. That’s a relatively new phenomenon (at least for white people) in our Great Nation. Before 2015 a Republican congressman who decided to defy Republican president really only had to fear losing his political career. But now? A nation of armed right-wing fascists. That will probably be the real role of the SA — sorry, I meant ICE. Armed, masked fascists who can abduct or kill at will.
rikyrah
Esaias Guthrie’s Stylist
@DNjtrenton
No news outlets are talking about how these 2 black mayors have achieved record low homicides in their cities.
https://x.com/DNjtrenton/status/1940084580708504010
Jay
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/11/trump-china-tariffs-california-farms
Not mentioned is the impact of new food safety rules in the EU, Japan and Canada. Inspections are taking longer, with perishables rotting on the docks, and shipments being refused. Fruit, vedge, meat, dairy, due to barring the use of pesticides, certain GMO crops, hormones, herbicides that US Ag still commonly uses.
Then you have the ICE raids, which doesn’t just effect the farms, but also the packing plants, cold storage, shipping, brokerages.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/01/ice-raids-crops-california-farms.
And then, there are the after effects of last years fires.
Trade Journals estimate that so far, since January, (winter crops), California Ag has lost up to $18 billion dollars so far this year.
One of the ways we notice it here, is the Okanogan Cherry Growers had $20 billion dollars in sales, this year, to China, Japan, the EU, the US, Australia, a 75% increase over 2024, and other than the US, they are all 5 year exclusive contracts. They all used to be US Customers.
MagdaInBlack
@Jay: https://texaswheat.org/harvest-updates/
HopefullyNotcassandra
@eclare: I did not know that. It makes perfect sense. President Reagan taxed social security for the first time. It used to be kids got some grace on taxes so they could save for their future. President Reagan got rid of that too, so if you were a dependent, you paid full freight at 16.
rikyrah
@Jay:
Why are they burning the fields?
eclare
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
I didn’t know that. As always, the cruelty is the point.
HopefullyNotcassandra
The New Yorker has published part of Alexei Navalny’s diary from prison. It feels fitting to post it here.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir?utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=bluesky&mbid=social_bluesky&utm_brand=tny
UncleEbeneezer
@zhena gogolia: And those Kamala tweets…oh that horrible Dem Messaging!!!
TONYG
@They Call Me Noni: Without birthright citizenship it is effectively impossible for ANYONE to prove his or citizenship. How many people have documents proving the citizenship of their ancestors. Even if you have such documents, how can you prove that the documents were not forged? The real purpose of eliminating birthright citizenship is to place the power of determining citizenship in the hands of federal authorities — authorities who might declare certain people to be non-citizen untermenschen for any number of reasons (race, religion, poverty or “incorrect” political opinions). The power to control citizenship is the power to control almost everything.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Jay: I didn’t have that much detail. I knew this president’s tariffs and cosplay sadism was destroying our country’s farmers.
TONYG
@rikyrah: black mayors? Sounds uppity to me.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@rikyrah: because they could not get the crops harvested before they rotted
Farmers have been begging for a respite from ICE raids. The Goypers just pretend they cannot hear.
Trollhattan
@eclare: A friend was in grad school for accounting at the time Reagan was crafting his Wreck America Because Hippies tax overhaul. They nicknamed it Reagan’s Welfare for Accountants Bill. IIRC the rules changed each of the first three years.
TONYG
@Jeffro: I took Psychology 101 back in 1974. But even with that advanced training, I can’t figure out Clarence Thomas.
Jay
@Captain C:
it’s an easily spread fungus that causes the corn to rot on the stalk.
It can lead to ergot poisoning in humans and livestock if it gets into the food chain.
Symptoms are convulsions, muscle spasms, vomiting, hallucinations, and a gangrene in the extremities.
Some suspect the whole Salem Witch thing was mass ergot poisoning.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@cain: that won’t work either. There are Spanish land grants as well as parish records documenting Hispanic citizenship going back before our revolution. Some of us of Hispanic descent will find it easy to prove they were here long before most of us. Catholic Churches keep extensive parish records.
Trollhattan
@JWR:
Our 4th might be unexpectedly quiet, on account of this happening.
Aerials show nothing left remotely resembling a warehouse.
TONYG
@rikyrah: Yeah, really. Why burn the unharvested fields? Is that just Texas stupidity?
Trollhattan
A judge did a thing and Trump will ignore that thing.
Betty Cracker
@rikyrah: I think Netanyahu bears much of the blame for that, not just due to his wholly disproportionate and cruel response to the horrific 10/7 attacks on Israel but for openly siding with Repubs against Dems from Obama to the present. As far as I know, that was unprecedented, and Israel may come to rue the day.
Trollhattan
@TONYG:
SWAG pest control.
What I want to know is with mechanical harvesting, how hard is it to find folks who can operate a combine/harvesting thingie. This ain’t picking lemons in an orchard.
TONYG
@HopefullyNotcassandra: That’s right. But corrupt courts will determine what evidence is and is not admissible.
NotMax
@JWR
Tariffs upped the price of the splodeys so that people are waiting to set off what they can now afford on the 4th?
scav
@Jay: Isn’t corn smut also huitlacoche and entirely edible? The ergot I’m most familiar with infects rye, although it wouldn’t surprise me there is one that goes after corn. But I’ve eaten corn smut.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@HopefullyNotcassandra: The Mormans are an amazing resource on this too.
gene108
I’ll believe a white rural anti-Republican backlash is brewing only when the votes are counted.
In my 51 years, I have seen nothing that can shake the long term support most rural white people have for Republicans.
NotMax
@Trollhattan
That’s taking YOLO to a whole ‘nother level.
//
dm
@Matt McIrvin: and Massachusetts gave up Maine to be a state as part of the “Missouri Compromise”, so the slave states wouldn’t have a majority in the Senate when Missouri was admitted, I think.
This kind of dividing isn’t so weird. Take Michigan. Must be an M state thing.
Citizen Alan
@Shalimar: I want that jackass kicked out of the country. And I want his idiot wife to be stuck raising 4 kids by herself. Maybe the whole damned family will move to Europe. We have too many fools in this country as it is.
Citizen Alan
@TONYG: Not just this shit-hole country. The mofo moved from Denmark to Mississippi!
martha
@Trollhattan: wow you just sent me down a rabbit hole! We were just in Esparto and Capay (mom was born on a ranch near there). Every time we come west we visit the Capay Cemetery where I’ve got 4 generations of relatives. I’ll be monitoring Watch Duty now.
Chief Oshkosh
@TONYG: The most antisemitic, misogynistic people I’ve ever encountered were from Switzerland. A couple of their cantons are known for it.
MagdaInBlack
@Trollhattan: Custom wheat/grain harvesters: my husband worked with a team of them when he was service manager for a company that made combine heads and cutter bars.
https://uschi.com/
stinger
@Jay:
Source? I haven’t seen this in the news, nor does googling bring anything up, for either corn smut nor burning fields on purpose.
NotMax
@Citizen Alan
Birds of a feather flock together?
//
Baud
sixthdoctor
(dupe of above post)
Salty Sam
Jay, can you provide a citation for this?
dm
@TONYG: Probably cheaper than plowing it under to make room for planting the winter wheat.
I think harvesting is done primarily by itinerant crews that basically start in Texas and drive North to Alberta.
stinger
@JWR: Same here. I live out in the country, and people tend to ignore state and local fireworks laws. It’ll probably start up tomorrow.
NotMax
@stinger
Cornhub?
//
Ohio Mom
@Jay: I did not know Washington lost most of the cherry crop but that explains why the Mt Rainier cherries at my little neighborhood produce store were $10 a pound. I looked at them longingly for a moment before I pushed the shopping cart forward.
gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
Being able to define who is a citizens also sets the stage for who gets full citizenship rights. It makes citizenship contingent on legislative or executive action, and not an inherent right to anyone.
Opens the door to create apartheid policies.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Trollhattan: how awful!
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@JWR: They’ve been setting them off for about a week around here.
eclare
@Trollhattan:
I didn’t start public accounting til 1991, but that sounds accurate. There is even a book about it!
https://www.amazon.com/Showdown-Gucci-Gulch-Lawmakers-Lobbyists/dp/0394758110
me
@NotMax: Yes, they get it from China, the article says only some stores are seeing lower sales. https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/as-tariffs-impact-nw-indiana-fireworks-businesses-some-look-to-absorb-cost/3780652/
Jay
@TONYG:
Resentment and entitlement.
He resents that he was a DEIA Law Student, a DEIA Judge, and he thinks he was entitled to be a White Shoe Law Firm Partner raking in millions of dollars a year, instead of merely being a DEIA Supreme Court Judge.
Geminid
@Trollhattan: Yeah, rice cropping is almost all mechanized. People typically don’t set foot on a rice field except to check for pests. The rest of the work is done from a tractor.
Arkansas accounts for 45% of U.S. rice production. Harvest there and in the other Mississiopi basin states takes place late summer into the fall., so it is unlikely any rice crop is rotting in the field already. Fields are often burned after harvest to suppress pests.
MagdaInBlack
@Jay: Corn smut and ergot are not the same thing.
”
Ergot disease caused by Claviceps purpurea infects the grains and produces a hard, black sclerotium that replaces the grain in the head. This sclerotium, also known as “ergot,” contains alkaloids that are toxic to both humans and animals. Ingesting ergot-infested grains can cause hallucinations, convulsions, and gangrene.
In crops, ergot can also cause significant losses in yield and quality. University of Missouri Extension just released an article, Time to Scout for Ergot, reminding growers to start scouting for this disease.
In contrast to ergot, which is caused by a single pathogen and has one name, the name and causal agents of smut diseases vary depending on different host. For examples, the covered smut on oats and barley is caused by Ustilago hordei while it is caused by Tilletia laevis on wheat; the loose smut is caused by Ustilago nuda on barley and by Ustilago tritici on wheat (Figure 1).”
eclare
@Jay:
Interesting, thanks.
Ohio Mom
@rikyrah: It’s hard to argue against stereotyping people after seeing that video clip.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@gene108: FDR shook it really good, but that was more than 51 years ago.
Remember for the Midwest, the attachment to the GOP is related to bloody Kansas, John Brown and the free soil movement. All of those sentiments still live there. John Brown still rages righteously on the walls of Kansas’ Capitol in Topeka, too. You can have excessively strange conversations in which folks are accusing Dixiecrats of destroying everything that Lincoln (& FDR- yup, still!) built and wonder if the person speaking has any connection to modern reality.
NotMax
@Ohio Mom
“Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?”
“Hell no. Not at these prices.”
Doc Sardonic
@Trollhattan: More difficult than you might think. Modern combines are complex pieces of equipment that now have a lot of electronics controlling things. Even when the electronic controls there are still lots of moving parts that if you make a mistake with can cause a very expensive repair bill or death and/or dismemberment. You stick somebody that can operate a lawn or field tractor behind the controls of a combine, it’s much like throwing a single engine Cessna pilot in the cockpit of a 747
HopefullyNotcassandra
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: here too
HopefullyNotcassandra
@TONYG: farmers burn fields for a lot of reasons. There is not a lot of trash pickup in rural America for one. Farmers don’t burn their fields for that (at least not on purpose). They also burn a field to change the chemical composition of the land.
Nettoyeur
@TONYG: I’ll make it easy for you. Thomas suffers from the cruelty on command syndrome that afflicted the the Soviet NKVD “legal officials” in the Stalin era. Underneath, they were afraid that the machine they built would destroy them, so they bent over backward to please the Boss. And guess what, the Boss was fickle, and changed tack every couple of years, at which point the hierarchy was blamed for the slaughter they inflicted and liquidated in turn. Rinse and repeat. Sound familiar?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@rikyrah: post that at least once a week please, everywhere you can
NotMax
@HopefullyNotcassandra
The burning of sugar cane fields before harvest was quite the sight on Maui before cane growing was phased out.
eclare
@Doc Sardonic:
That is what I have heard second hand from farmers in the Delta. People have no idea how massive and complex the farm equipment is now.
tobie
Sorry to ask a pretty basic procedural question but if the House changes the bill sent to it by the Senate, does the Senate need to vote on it again?
Jay
@Salty Sam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drb8_MF5_vM
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/amber-waves-of-grain-recede-in-americas-heartland-as-wheat-farmers-struggle/
https://www.farmtalknews.com/news/wheat-farmers-cut-losses-as-harvest-lags/article_2cd779fc-995b-4a54-aa9b-ac998baaafa3.html
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-farmers-face-higher-costs-fewer-markets-tariffs-farm-groups-warn-2025-03-04/
https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/business-inputs/article/2025/02/05/citing-financial-struggles-rice-asks
Doc Sardonic
@TONYG: Simple…… Clarence Thomas is Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Django
JWR
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Huh. That’s weird, because no one around here seems to be in a noise making mood. We’ll see.
Trollhattan
@Doc Sardonic:
I don’t doubt that. Just think pros trained to handle million-dollar harvesters aren’t prone to being swept up in ICE raids.
But since they’ve thrown away the rulebooks, who’s to say?
eclare
Oohhh…I just saw today’s photo. Bliss.
Omnes Omnibus
@chemiclord: Spanish too. Valdivia did a guest post about a couple of years ago.
Trollhattan
@HopefullyNotcassandra: @NotMax:
Sacramento Valley rice growers once burned the fields post harvest for disease prevention, but then the air quality hippies discovered the smoke contains enormous amounts of silica and we eventually banned the practice.
Today I think they disc the stubble under, instead.
tobie
@Trollhattan: @Geminid: I live next to a farm that used to rotate between corn and soy for animal feed, since corn depletes the soil of nitrogen. (Now they just use more fertilizers and stick with corn. I don’t drink my well water for this reason.) Best I can tell, the farmer comes by two or three times a year to plant seed and then to harvest. They use a prop jet to spray the field with noxious chemicals at the beginning of the season. Farming’s not labor intensive. Far from it.
Jay
@dm:
That’s large Ag. You need to have enough hectares to make it worth hiring/contracting a mobile crew, because moving the equipment is extremely expensive.
Medium Ag, the farmer usually has the equipment, (and a ton of debt), hires experienced migrant labour to do both the planting and the harvest, and then subcontracts the equipment and labour out to smaller farms.
Some of the smaller farms have all the equipment, but it’s often very old, less efficient and duct taped together.
Doc Sardonic
@Trollhattan: True, don’t know about now, but those itinerant combining crews were families that found it more profitable to migrate and harvest. However, from a farming standpoint I remember as a kid plowing under fields because the market collapsed and the produce wasn’t worth the cost to harvest, so we would let folks pick what they needed, then plow it.
HopefullyNotcassandra
Hear ye! Hear ye! Good news here
U.S District Judge Moss ruled, in an exceptionally long ruling, this president cannot deport asylum seekers.
The Judge acknowledged the asylum backlog and said nothing in our immigration law provides
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-asylum-border-judge-blocks/
This undermines the case for much of what ICE has been doing. The judge certified a class but delayed that certification for fourteen days so the administration can appeal.
In my humble opinion, this Judge is right on the law. We shall see. This is good news for today.
Citizen Dave
@tobie: Just trying to remember my schoolhouse rock–this might jog your memory: via google: A conference committee is formed when the House and Senate pass different versions of the same bill. It’s a temporary, ad hoc committee made up of members from both chambers, tasked with negotiating a compromise that can be approved by both the House and the Senate. If successful, the conference committee produces a report outlining the agreed-upon version, which must then be passed by both the House and Senate to become law.
They Call Me Noni
@Matt McIrvin: A few years ago I piddled with Ancestry, but I didn’t pay the upcharge for international research. I should have. Anyways, my mother’s side of the family immigrated from Canada to Maine and then eventually to New York. They’d be running the other direction now!
Aziz, light!
Burning restores nutrients to the soil, and is an age-old practice.
snoey
@Jay: Iowa corn doesn’t have smut isn’t even tasseling yet.
satby
@rikyrah: they aren’t, as @MagdaInBlack: shows in her comment.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@MagdaInBlack: that is a relief. Thank you for linking that
snoey
@satby: The price of wheat is low and some poorly yielding and/or damaged fields aren’t worth harvesting. Not at all we can’t harvest.
dnfree
@Jeffro: Yes, “Everybody Knows” is very relevant. On the other hand, “Democracy is Coming (to the USA)” unfortunately has not aged well.
mrmoshpotato
@dm:
Mostly likely. If this shit passes, I can totally see the media yelling “People aren’t dropping dead left and right! Why were the Democrats crying wolf?”
Baud
@tobie:
Yes.
satby
@snoey: where I lived farmers plowed under for green manure, often concurrent with fertilizer to accelerate decomposition. They rotated feed corn with soybeans, but in the almost 9 years I lived out surrounded by farm fields I never saw fields get burned even if prices were crap that year.
Piles of garbage, on the other hand, got burned all the time.
NotMax
@me
Jean Shepherd knew about fireworks and Hammond, Indiana.
;)
snoey
@satby: Wheat stubble sometimes gets burned after harvest, not before. That’s about it.
tobie
@Citizen Dave: Thanks. This is very helpful. We should keep up the pressure on Murkowski. This bill may not make it through conference.
Ramona
@Betty Cracker: I have my fingers crossed that “we all die” Iowa Senator Ernst loses her seat to a Democrat challenger one of whom, an ex-marine, was present at her Friday 7:30 AM town hall where she said that in response to an audience member pointing out that the Medicaid cuts proposed in the budget bill would cause premature deaths.
Ramona
@TONYG: If intelligence is such that median intelligence coincides with average intelligence, then half of all people all people are below average intelligence. This Dane may well be one of the less intelligent half.
Ken B
@TONYG: Trump is not the Evangelical’s leader.
He’s their god.
Ramona
@gvg: Nationalize the health insurance companies. This was financially feasible in the aftermath of the Great Recession but Obama was no socialist.
Captain C
@mrmoshpotato: And when disaster does ensue, followed by some combination of “Noooobody could have foreseen this!” and “Who knows how this happened? It probably was the fault of Biden and the Democrats…”
Ramona
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I’m ignorant of agriculture but wouldn’t ploughing the unharvested crops back into the soil be easier and preserve the soil?
Ruckus
@Hunter Gathers:
What about people born say 70 years ago and not in a hospital? You know born in a farm house in Kansas, without a doctor, to parents born there, whose parents were also born there. My father was born in KS and brought to CA when he was 1 yr old in a horse drawn wagon over dirt trails/because paved roads didn’t exist in much of the US, other than big cities.
I’m an old and as I understand it a lot of people not a whole lot older than me were born outside of a hospital. Some of us kids in elementary school discussed this once and a number of people I grew up with were born outside of a hospital. I was born in the same hospital as my mom, although it had been rebuilt at least once between us, and no longer exists, having been rebuilt a total of 5 times over the decades.
Ramona
@Citizen Alan: she could just move to Denmark with him and brave their cold winters but avail herself of universal health care.
Ramona
@Chief Oshkosh: Swiss women did not gain the vote until the seventies!
sab
@TONYG: I used ro be embarrassed that my paternal grandmother was a member of the DAR. Now I ‘m almost relieved.
My maternal grandmother and Mom would have problems. Immigrants all, and the women had no need for citizenship or naturalizing because they couldn’t vote so why bother.
Fair Economist
@rikyrah: This is my non-shocked face. Well, about the media. I’m impressed by those mayors!
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: The other half of it is that they claim the government’s right to deport noncitizens implies that noncitizens effectively have no constitutional rights. All the stuff the Bill of Rights says they can’t do to “persons”, they can do to noncitizens. And they can revoke visas extrajudicially for any reason, too.
So, put together, all that means that they can instantly wish you or me or anybody into being an “illegal”, and then, because you’re an “illegal” they can kidnap you and torture you or do anything they want. Effectively, it’s the total annihilation of law.
Ruckus
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Why is it that whenever they do shitty things, people get mad at our party?
Because they know that the rethuglican party won’t actually do much of anything in a modern world basis.
I’ve wondered a few times if rethuglicans want the country to go backasswards enough that they can get rid of many laws and things that are vital to a modern economy and a population the size of the one we have. And a lot has changed in the last 50-75 years, so I’d bet that if they got what they want, they’d be pissed off beyond belief, because so much has changed and living in a world of 50-75 years ago really wouldn’t fit within anything like modern life.
I think what is pissing them off is the premise that they really do not get to just decide and rule, and their desired world would be shit but they have no idea/way how to belong to the current world.
sab
@Trollhattan: At least they discussed the rule changes ahead of time. Essays and articles were all over the financial press during Reagan’s terms.
Under Bush they staeted changing the rules quite suddenly, and sometimes retroactively. I can remember at least twice when there were major tax changes at the end of March, when corporate returns had already been filed ( due March 15.) We had to go back and correct/amend tax rerurns that were correct when file early in March, but were made incorrect by legislation passed and signed at the end of March.
And under the new reality, continuing education in the summer is a joke, because the rules will be different next winter. That’s going to be the case this year. These courses don’t write or teach themselves. People have to read ananalyze the changes in the law, and prepare the courses. It will be well into August before anyone has any idea what the new rules will be. So much for anyone being able to tax plan before October.
How do businesses even budget?
WTFGhost
@Hunter Gathers: And now, Trump can violate birthright citizenship while waiting to find out if the scotus is going to legalize his actions, or not. No court oversight – dear lord, no, due process is just a word the scotus throws out there once in a while to show that they still remember it exists. “Out there” might be in the direction of the toilet, since that’s what you do with someone you wipe your(ahem) with something you wipe with.
@Belafon: I’ve long felt that Republicans gamed the journalism system, by putting incredibly unethical requirements for coverage, or, “you’ll be cut out, and I’ll give it all to Fox and NewsMax, and so forth.”
And the horror with that, is, Democrats kinda-sorta shouldn’t be willing to make the same sorts of demands, but, that means journalists might quote Repubs exactly, and then, to save column inches, report only that “leading Democrats disagreed, calling the measure ‘unfair’.”
@Betty Cracker: I mean, I hate the pain too, but, if you were going to have a true Republican economy, best that it start now, while they’re trying to pass every poison pill they’d ever tried to put into bills in the past.
WTFGhost
@JML: Oooh – and the animation, of an elephant turning into a pig, and back… the ears turn from big floppies to little upthrust, the trunk recedes, the color changes, et voila, you have a pig that knows enough French to know what “et voila” means.
(I thought it meant “and… a MUSICAL INSTRUMENT,” but I had “voila” confused with “piano.” Common error.)
Geminid
@Ramona: Turkish women got the vote in 1934. Kemal Ataturk waited ten years to institute that reform, but he knew it was essential for modernization.
Jackie
Has this been mentioned?
the rest is behind a paywall; I have no idea if FFOTUS reacted to that assertion or not.
Chief Oshkosh
@Betty Cracker: The Israeli government is simply a branch of the GOP, and vice versa, at this point. The Israeli government chose very purposefully to do this. IF there is ever a Democratic government again, it should the Israeli government exactly as much as it would support the far right GOP.
TONYG
@sab: Honestly, I have no real idea of the process that my ancestors went through when they came to this country (from Italy in my case) long ago. The past was a different world. My father’s parents came here in 1919. I don’t really know when my mother’s grandparents came here — the late 1880’s I think? In both cases this was long before the invention of computers. It’s very possible that the kind of meticulous paperwork that became commonplace in the mid-twentieth century didn’t exist then either. It’s very possible that they just walked off a steamship in New York City, went through some minimal “processing”, and then went to work. If there were any papers, they ended up in somebody’s attic and eventually disappeared. Why on earth would anybody keep papers from more than century ago?
Ruckus
@Jackie:
It is difficult to see what shitforbrains knows/doesn’t know.
I mean an easy bet is that what he doesn’t know is a hell of a lot more than what he does, especially if you are looking for any kind of reality. First of all he doesn’t actually seem to want to know much and actually hasn’t for most of his life. He likes what he sees in a mirror. Or at least what he thinks he sees….
stinger
Satby @193:
In areas of drought, there is a risk of fields catching fire accidentally, and weather reports routinely warn of the danger. Intentional burning of crops, at least in my midwestern state, is extremely rare and hasn’t happened in 2025 so far. But I guess you have to be Canadian to understand U.S. agriculture.
TONYG
A high proportion of the “white” people in this country had ancestors who were not considered to be “white”, who came to the U.S. in the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century (before the openly nordicist 1924 immigration act). Many of those “white” people are just fine with what Trump and Miller are doing. They think that they are protected by their “white” skin. They might learn otherwise. This is an attack on the concept of citizenship, an attempt to grant citizenship only to a favored few who bow down to their masters. Everyone is threatened by this.
Lauryn11
@Chief Oshkosh: One Swiss canton denied women the vote in their local elections until 1990. This was long after women’s suffrage was granted for federal elections in the early 1970s. Women couldn’t serve in the military because they had to stay in traditional roles, and so, didn’t “deserve” the vote.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: Emphasizing your point: Google tells me that Jimmy Carter was the first US president born in a hospital.
We have to fight the monsters every single day.
Grrr….
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Ramona: I don’t know. What you wrote sounds right. Most farmers I knew fallowed a field, or planted clover to improve yield.
Ruckus
@TONYG:
Why on earth would anybody keep papers from more than century ago?
Why not? I mean sure the info may be in a form of language that very few might be able to truly understand, given how much language has changed in that time and would what is written likely be handwritten and difficult to actually read in any event? Typewriters started to be in commercial use in 1867 so it would sort of silly that they hadn’t been used for at least 125 years. I mean sure we mostly use printers these days. I write very little any more, although I do type a lot, as most of us do anymore, we just use a computer rather than a typewriter.
But to your point some papers extremely old might have value that we might not see. How about a property deed? Or a historical document? How about my 99 year old neighbor who might actually need her birth certificate?
Jackie
@Ruckus:
If he truly doesn’t realize cutting Medicaid is in his bill and is threatening to primary every congressperson who votes against it, he’ll be in for a rude shock in Nov ‘26. I could almost feel pity for republican congress critters … but, NOPE, I don’t. They made their bargain with the devil…
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
I’m an old, as stated here a few times and when I was born, in the first half of the last century, a lot of people were not born in hospitals. Now for a lot of them there wasn’t a hospital all that close and from what I’ve learned over the years a fair number of women do not get all that much of a warning about junior showing up. I mean they know a new human is arriving but not exactly when. And doctors often made house calls because they could carry most everything they needed in that little black bag.
Hospitals, at least the concept of what one does goes back a few centuries but if you look at the population of a lot of US cities 100-125 years ago, many did not have one and in many places a lot of this country is still relatively rural, with not enough people living close enough to have a hospital in every town.
Jackie
@Ruckus: Also “way back when,” including my dad and his siblings, being born at home was the NORM: Dad said most babies were born at home as a protection from all the sickness and diseases in hospitals. One went to the hospital because one was sick. Hospital attended birthings were only if something went awry, and a C-section or other hospital medical assistance was needed.
I’m not sure when hospital birthing became the norm.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
Wow. That is a big deal. Maybe people do trust a leader that looks more like them. Me I don’t care what someone looks like that works for me (and in public life – everyone else….) I care about what and how well they do the work they were hired to do. My father started a tooling manufacturing business when I was 12 or 13 and in the end I owned it longer than he did and have hired a lot of people to do specific work, that requires knowledge and training. I could mention some of the products that the tools we built made and most everyone would have seen/used products that those tools made. My last job – retired going on 3 years ago (I’m over 3/4 of a century old) – I built a lot of things out of metal in that last job as well and my last part I machined had a tolerance of +/- 0.0025 of an inch. I’ve made products and tools with smaller tolerances but not many.
Ruckus
@Jackie:
The devil is more humane than he is. Also more trustworthy and better looking.
lowtechcyclist
@snoey:
There should be a joke in here about how the corn needs smut in order to stand up.
Ruckus
@Jackie:
Some of the concept of hospital births came a few decades ago as medicine became more than what could be carried in a doctor’s bag or what minimal science had actually been proven. Also with a large growth of humanity a lot more doctors and hospitals are needed. And a hell of a lot of human knowledge does not go very far back. Yes a lot of the basics, math for example do but medicine has come a very long way in the lifetime of people alive today. Take medicines, there is a HUGE difference between today and 75-100 years ago. What they can do, how they are made, how some of us cannot tolerate some meds and why. How some meds work better for some that work not as well or at all on others. How much is known in figuring out what disease you are dealing with and why one cure might be better for one patient than another. It goes on and on.
I worked in manufacturing metal tools that made other products most of my life and the machines today are far, far different and better than what I saw when I started. And far, far more accurate. When I started we used pencils for the math needed. Geometry, trigonometry, all done using pencil and paper. We made tools that companies used to make calculator cases a long time ago, when they first came out. Without calculators.
Ksmiami
@Jay: definitely it was the culprit when that whole town in feudal France went insane
Timill
@Ruckus: And slide rules. I’m slightly younger than you and I have used a slide rule professionally, not just in school.
satby
@stinger: 😂
satby
@TONYG: well, the “process” for most of the history of this country up to the early 1900s was to get on a ship somewhere with your name listed on the manifest, and get off the ship in a port in America, where they matched your name to the ship manifest. No papers, no passports, no visas. Later a cursory physical exam that took just a few minutes might be added, usually during times of higher infection rates of TB. That was it. That’s why when people claim their ancestors “came to the country the right way, legally” in any time earlier than around 1910 or so, I just laugh. Because just walking in sans any official documentation WAS the legal way.
TONYG
@satby: Yes, that sounds about right. The bureaucratic system for “processing” all those immigrants hadn’t really been set up yet. Business owners wanted cheap labor, and that was that (unless the immigrant was obviously sick). No papers, no nothing. That all changed with the openly racist 1924 Immigration Act. That law kept out most of the sub-humans, including Italians and, of course, Jews.
Jay
@TONYG:
The Immigration Act of 1917 was the first to apply to Europeans.
It required a literacy test. Adult Immigrants had to be able to read 30-40 words in their own language.
In the 1921 Act, as far as Italians go, a quota was imposed. Only 3% of the number of Italians already residing in the US, based on the 1910 Census were allowed in annually
Basically, 1952 was when Immigrant’s got copies of their “papers”.
sab
@sab: Mom’s people came either directly from Ireland, or indirectly as Canadian Scots (some of whom married Swiss to Canada immigrants). The Canadians were women. The Irish were laborers. I doubt any of their descendants can prove any legitimate attachment to USA except they have been living here 100+ years.
I bet I can document my family here 200 years before JD Vance’s crew got off the boat. That proves nothing. We used to welcome immigrants.