Yikes! Kevin McCarthy just got called out to his face live on CNBC over his debt ceiling hypocrisy. The host noted that McCarthy raised the debt ceiling 3 times under Trump and added $2 trillion to the deficit with his tax cuts for the wealthy. pic.twitter.com/RudZNpg6Ko
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 17, 2023
Speaker McCarthy went all the way to Wall Street and gave us no new information at all—just political grandstanding.
If he continues in this direction, we are headed to default.
Speaker McCarthy: Show us your plan.No blackmail. No brinkmanship. No default.
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 17, 2023
No matter how good the speech, or how shrewd the posturing, the ball is in Rs' court. They have to demonstrate they can pass something (anything) before things can proceed. Until then, Biden content to hold out, and who can blame him.
— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) April 17, 2023
1. Why bail Rs out if they can’t get their act together?
2. To the extent Speaker is willing to bargain in good faith, what’s it worth if he can’t be counted on to corral the votes?
3. Unless Rs show they’ll vote for lift–even a conditional one–WH wary that default is the goal.
With that being said, the menu that has been floated suggests a recognition of this dynamic. Anything that adds votes and unites the conference belongs in; anything that divides it should be left out. Worry about what can become law after you establish a consensus starting point.
If you do that (still a big if), the Biden retort of “show us your budget” becomes increasingly untenable. Except for setting the topline approps figure (which will be deemed anyway once they settle on one), all budgets are political LARPs.
A reminder that absolutely nothing has changed in the past three months https://t.co/1p88BleyyT
— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) April 17, 2023
McCarthy should follow his own “work requirement” and put out a damn budget or forego his pay. https://t.co/1cWl8GOt1I
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) April 17, 2023
What we saw this morning is clear:
Democrats want to avoid defaulting on our country’s debts.
Meanwhile, Speaker McCarthy continues to bumble us towards a catastrophic default that would cause the economy to crash, spike job loss, and raise costs for American families. pic.twitter.com/XB8ce3DeBQ
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 17, 2023
Kevin McCarthy is a fundamentally unserious person. Even his own caucus regards him as a joke.
But he is the Speaker, and the Speaker is willing to crash the economy in order to hurt average Americans and help his rich donors.
— Santiago Mayer (@santiagomayer_) April 17, 2023
Just say you need Dem votes already Jesus
— Lord Businessman (@BusinessmanLego) April 17, 2023
Pity poor Kevin MCarthy? I don’t think so.
His problem is he has to ram through things Americans don’t want, all to gratify a few creepy billionaires who fund his party. Quit serving the creepy billionaires and things get easier.https://t.co/EEVWV71YYF
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) April 17, 2023
No matter how much they prefer the GOP, the FTFNYTimes could never resist the smell of blood in the water…
Pity poor Kevin McCarthy. Having sold his soul and torched his dignity to win his dream gig, the fledgling speaker of the House is struggling to find his groove…
Some Capitol Hill denizens suspect Mr. McCarthy remains disgruntled about his messy speaker’s race, during which, The Times noted, Mr. Arrington reportedly floated Mr. Scalise’s name for the top job. Whatever their origins, such tensions risk exacerbating Republican leaders’ struggles to rally their fractious, scrawny majority around legislative initiatives.
Indeed, the early report cards for this Congress have been underwhelming, prompting an unflattering assessment of Mr. McCarthy’s tenure compared with those of past Republican speakers such as Newt Gingrich and John Boehner. This conference has managed to pass its top legislative priority, a sprawling energy package that has a snowball’s chance of advancing through the Senate. But, thanks to internecine squabbling, Republicans have had to delay several major measures they had aimed to address early on, including a border security bill and a budget plan. Likewise, their orgy of investigations into all things Biden has had trouble gaining traction. Some Republicans have begun voicing concerns about the conference’s overall focus.
These are high-stakes times not only for Mr. McCarthy but for many of his team leaders as well. To which one can only say: Welcome to the majority, fellas.
Being in charge is hard. Sure, life in the House majority means you get to set the rules and shape the agenda for the chamber. But you also are expected to occasionally get stuff done, which is way harder than most folks realize.
Back in 2009, the minority leader at the time, Mr. Boehner — who by then had endured a couple of spins through the majority-minority cycle — stressed to me the burden of running things. “One of the great shocks of 1994 was — we had won the majority, and no one in our caucus had ever been in the majority — no one realized how much more work it is,” he recalled. “You hand the football off to a fullback, and he’s gotta run with it.”…
Pobrecita chancleta!
As Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi knew her shit, didn't take any shit, and had her shit together.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, on the other hand, is full of shit, doesn't do shit, and is scared shitless of Trump. pic.twitter.com/WDLJ1A0csB
— Middle Age Riot (@middleageriot) April 17, 2023
dmsilev
I guess Republicans In Disarray is the new narrative, at least for now. Post:
eclare
Governing is hard, who knew? Kind of like health care.
piratedan
to recap……
a hundred days in…..
the GOP House has kept zero of their promises
has not passed any meaningful legislation
and the GOP wants Biden to offer cuts to their lack of any specific suggestions…. so that they can then have the Dems “negotiate” against themselves…
Dems never held the country hostage when DJT was in charge and the GOP pulls this shit every time they are.
fuck you Kevin…..
Edmund dantes
McCarthy is like Donald in that he wanted all the trappings of the job but not the actual real work that goes into it.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
James E Powell
@piratedan:
They have kept their main promise to their voters: That they would make things worse & blame Biden & Democrats.
West of the Rockies
How can Mrs. McCarthy look at that empty, gray man and feel any pride, respect, or attraction? He’s a three-month-old kitchen sponge turned sentient.
Doc Sardonic
Kevin McCarthy couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with a faucet on the toe and directions on the heel.
Redshift
I find it hilarious that they haven’t been able to produce a “border security” messaging bill, which no one will read and whose only purpose it to make Democrats vote against it. It’s the least like real work of anything a Congressional caucus does, but they still can’t get it done.
There are so many flavors of dysfunction that could be responsible. My guess is everyone wants credit for it by no one wants to do any work, and they all have staff to post insults on Twitter and get them in Fox, but none to write legislation.
West of the Rockies
@piratedan:
The Republican Party is now an RV careening down old 66 on half a gallon of gas with four-year-old triplets directing the parents and two teenaged siblings to speed up and head for Death Valley, stat!
Captain C
@West of the Rockies:
“I’m married to the Speaker of the House, which is more than all those horrible other Republican Congressional wives can say, and besides, both the personal trainer and poolboy (or -girl/NB) are attractive and discreet.”
West of the Rockies
@Captain C:
You probably called it.
NotMax
@West of the Rockies
Love is blind.
Except on Netflix.
:)
Kristine
So are there enough Rs who would vote with Dems to raise the ceiling? Just wondering.
John Revolta
“This sucks! Can’t we just go back to complaining on television and lying about Democrats? WAAAAAAAA!”
Odie Hugh Manatee
@West of the Rockies:
…on twenty year old bald tires with sidewall cracks, careening along the edge of a cliff with a thousand foot drop.
CaseyL
The House GOP is not going to raise the debt ceiling, because (besides being spiteful and malicious) they’re also too stupid to understand what not raising it means.
Biden is going to have to pull a rabbit out of his hat to keep the US from defaulting.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
His problem is that he has the thinnest of majorities, and is legislating as if he has a mandate for punishment of the populace as a political ideology. He could make a solid tweak away from ideological assholery, and get about half the D caucus aboard, jettisoning his crazies.
They need to grow the fuck up and make sausage the old-fashioned way.
On an OT note, we’re now moving from Branson’s toney wine resort up to Kruger.
We’re in the second Pinotage Suite depicted. It is stunning.
https://www.virginlimitededition.com/en/mont-rochelle/rooms
Yesterday, we had lunch at a wine estate (Graff) with crazy security – turns out the Nigerian president’s wife was eating there too.
kindness
The billionaires who own the Republican party want the coming economic crash to happen. They’re going to make it work for them. Nothing Democrats offer will matter. With that in mind, telling Republicans to go screw themselves is the best option.
Major Major Major Major
Be funny if it weren’t so likely to be damaging. But I guess we can get our kicks there too.
Been spending a lot of time on Bluesky, the new social network beta that Jack Dorsey spun off a project on a couple years ago. It’s sort of like if Mastodon was implemented in a way that made sense. Really chill user base so far which is good because they’re still rolling out moderation.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/15/23683846/bluesky-twitter-clone-at-protocol-favorite
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: My memory of the docs I read on it (months ago) is that it’s basically impossible to scale. Like [not technically] blockchain.
Ruckus
Middle Age Riot said it best.
As Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi knew her shit, didn’t take any shit, and had her shit together.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, on the other hand, is full of shit, doesn’t do shit, and is scared shitless of Trump.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: it’s got some clever cryptography but I don’t see why it would cause scaling issues.
piratedan
@Major Major Major Major: i like being on The Derm, Jack wasn’t any great shakes at keeping his old place clean by following his own TOS and had to be shamed to keep the Nazi’s in check, I see no reason to trust that he’s learned a damn thing from that experience.
Major Major Major Major
@piratedan: he’s not really involved with it at all. On the board but it isn’t his. Here’s a recent post on their approach to moderation. https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
gene108
@CaseyL:
Sec. Yellen is already pulling rabbits out of hats to keep us from defaulting.
If the debt ceiling isn’t raised in the next few months, she runs out of hats and rabbits to keep from defaulting.
********************
Reading this roundup, I’m beginning to think we default. Boehner and Ryan were willing to do a few things not in accordance with the Freedom Caucus and other do-nothing kooks to keep the government functioning.
I don’t think McCarthy is wired to do anything to upset any faction, even if it means a default. He’ll cling to being Speaker as the country burns.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: It has no partitioning (sharding) in the design. None at all. If you want to scale a TP system, either it’d better be really, really simple) and twitter’s social-graph subscription model puts paid to that) or it had better be designed from the ground-up to be partitionable.
Chetan Murthy
@piratedan: the mere fact that the design rationale privileges anti-censorship, kinda gives that away, eh ? I mean, it’s explicitly “we can’t keep the Nazis from drinking in this bar, maaaaan, freeze peach!”
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: guess I haven’t thought about it at that layer, I’ll look into it.
Hildebrand
@Kristine: That’s my question, as well. As fun as it is to watch the Republicans flail, this needs to get done. How do we get there from here?
gene108
@gene108:
I don’t get how Republican billionaire sugar daddies are okay with risking default. It’d wipe out a lot of wealth from top to bottom.
Kristine
I wonder what Biden advised PBO to do during that debt ceiling crisis. Was he on the side of negotiation or did he want to sit tight?
piratedan
@Major Major Major Major: sorry, enjoy your Bluesky experience. I’ll maintain my feeds and connections over on The Derm. Just after watching how Twitter evolved and then was corrupted, I’d just as soon not trust anyone connected with it.
Major Major Major Major
It’s so warm upstairs in my house. Is this what having two floors is like? Or do I need to get something insulated.
Major Major Major Major
@piratedan:
what is the derm?
ETA:
Current situation at twitter is basically what twitter was like before 2019, moderation-wise.
Kristine
@Hildebrand: I fear if McCarthy went that route he could kiss the speakership goodbye and he lacks the courage to take what would admittedly be a pretty startling step. Still, I wonder if he’s been sending out feelers to Jeffries.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: The simplest way to understand the scalability problem is to consider how you would scale a system using a bunch of memcached servers. Would you have writers just pick a random server into which to write? Or write to more than one, again randomly? Or would you have them compute which server to write to (and maybe a fixed number of backups) using some deterministic function of the key ? Obviously the latter, for at least two reasons:
So the system can scale both in throughput, and data-set size. Whereas, if you did as these hopelessly naive “just push your updates anywhere, they’ll get thru” designs advocate, you would both fail at scaling throughput, and also fail at efficiently using memory.
Jack has lost his mind, drank too deeply of the bitcoin kool-aid.
prostratedragon
Learned a new word today: sfigato:
“Losing Hand,” Little Milton.
Chetan Murthy
Open Thread, so: I was today years old when I learned that Little Richard was gay, and grew up surrounded by gay culture, which infused his rock-and-roll.
NotMax
Debt ceiling will be raised and passed. It’ll go down to the last minute, with gobs of Sturm und Drang and torrents of empty bloviating in the interim, but it’ll happen.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: aren’t you just describing every current federated social network, except for Nostr, Farcaster etc. (the dumb blockchain ones)?
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Phew. On first cursory glance misread that as “a bunch of menarche servers.”
B-J After Dark, indeed. ;)
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, even Mastodon has problems in this regard, but they’re *less* severe than in the case of Jack’s thing (or, at least, any social network that explicitly uses a “gossip” pub/sub model for dissemination).
I should be clear that a clustered (e.g. Twitter, FB, Google+) design will always be more efficient than a federated design: this is simply unavoidable. But if you’re going to go with federation, you can *at least* make it not-ridiculously-anti-scaling.
I once did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation on data-rates and -set-sizes. It should be obvious that you can’t manage such a system without *explicitly* organizing all data for scalability.
userid:: 16 bytes
Users:: 1B (== 2^30) users, each with 1K (== 2^10) profile metadata
and a 1M (== 2^20) profile image
Tweets:: 1B tweets/day, 1K per tweet
Follows:: each user follows 256 other users
Followers:: a user may be followed by 1B other users
Tweet retention:: Let’s plan for 2^4 years, and let’s pretend each
year has 2^9 days
The total size of
* all user metadata will be 1TB (== 2^40);
* all user profile images will be 1PB (== 2^50)
* the follow-graph will be 8TB (== 2^30 * 2^1 * 2^4 * 2^8 == 2^43)
* The service will generate 1TB of tweets per day
* and eventually retain 8EB (== 2^9 * 2^4 * 2^40 == 2^53) of tweet data.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: Oh wait, I think I might have misunderstood your question. My critique is *first* addressed at all the ones inspired by blockchain, that work on the conceit that they can just “gossip” (in the sense of the distributed systems “gossip” protocols) as a means of dissemination. I forget whether Nostr does that, but IIRC, that’s at the heart of Jack’s proposal. But then it can also be applied to systems like Mastodon, that simply haven’t taken into account the problems of scaling.
Just so you don’t think I’m playing favorites, here’s an example of a Mastodon scaling issue: when server A hosts Justin Bieber, and server B hosts 100k of his fans, then when Justin tweets, that tweet will be transported 100k times to server B. That’s ridiculous, and it’s because the “ActivityPub” spec is at the level of “mailboxes” and “subscriptions”, not at the level of “what needs to be replicated from server A to server B”.
piratedan
@Major Major Major Major: The Derm=Pachyderm=Mastodon
piratedan
@Major Major Major Major: The Derm=Pachyderm=Mastodon
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: Oh wait, I think I might have misunderstood your question. My critique is *first* addressed at all the ones inspired by blockchain, that work on the conceit that they can just “gossip” (in the sense of the distributed systems “gossip” protocols) as a means of dissemination. I forget whether Nostr does that, but IIRC, that’s at the heart of Jack’s proposal. But then it can also be applied to systems like Mastodon, that simply haven’t taken into account the problems of scaling.
Just so you don’t think I’m playing favorites, here’s an example of a Mastodon scaling issue: when server A hosts Justin Bieber, and server B hosts 100k of his fans, then when Justin tweets, that tweet will be transported 100k times to server B. That’s ridiculous, and it’s because the “ActivityPub” spec is at the level of “mailboxes” and “subscriptions”, not at the level of “what needs to be replicated from server A to server B”.
piratedan
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: are you sure you’re not thinking of Nostr?
ETA okay I think you were thinking of Nostr, which Jack is actually involved with.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: It’s been a long time, and I might be. But last I remember, BlueSky also relied on gossip for dissemination, and that’s enough to render it useless for anything real. Gossip (and all best-effort eventual-consistency methods) never scale for anything requiring high throughput or data-set-size. The salient example of them working is the DNS …. but the DNS is not a large data-set, individual entries typically have long lifetimes, and it doesn’t have high write-throughput, so it can be effectiively cached without problems.
There are no actual other examples of efficient gossip-based/eventual-consistency systems: for example, it’s well-known that Cassandra systems are wildly inefficient, like 10x worse (or more) than equivalent Paxos-based systems.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: they’re pretty behind on their docs tbh but in public statements they’re very concerned about performance, and it’s evolving. Of the options I think it’s the most likely to pan out.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: What can I say? I wish them luck. But the next Twitter-replacement that really catches on, and doesn’t die under its own weight, will be one that is clustered, not federated. It might have some add-on protocol for federation, but the “main instance” will be clustered, implemented much like Titter/FB/Google+. B/c building a scalable federated Twitter-like system is *hard*.
smike
@West of the Rockies:
Well, almost sentient. Missed it by thaaaat much.
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy: we’ll see! I’m impressed by the team and their attitude, and that’s gonna matter more than the current state of things. If anything I’d say they’ll fail post-beta because of user experience/culture—optionally-decentralized moderation could be a total failure.
Jay
@Major Major Major Major:
hot air rises, first floor heat eventually makes it’s way upstairs.
Thermostats should be on the second floor. If you have forced air heating, you can adjust the vents on the second floor to reduce the airflow.
If it’s hot out, and the heat is off, but the upstairs is baking, then yeah, you need more insulation in the attic along with better attic ventilation.
Major Major Major Major
@Jay: it’s when it’s hot out, yeah. Phooey.
Geminid
@Major Major Major Major: Does your attic have an exhaust fan? That might help.
Matt McIrvin
The mass of Republicans have no real incentive not to default because they think the usual pattern will hold and a global economic crash will get blamed on Biden. For the first time since Carter, the big recession comes on a Democrat’s watch, so they win, and they can MAKE it happen just by doing nothing.
So I figure any save depends on the Democrats trying to shave off a few Republicans to vote for a clean bill. But how to even get it to the floor?
Jay
@Major Major Major Major:
@Geminid:
Most homes built pre-2000, have inadequate attic insulation, inadequate soffit ventilation and inadequate attic ventilation.
I prefer proper passive ventilation over electric attic fans or those whirlygigs, as they tend not to last. They are a quick cheap fix, but don’t last, the thermostaically controlled solar powered fans, are best, if you have good soffit ventilation, but they only blow slightly more hot air out as the soffits or end vents will let cold air in.
Geminid
Good electric fans are long lasting. At least, that has been my observation. Attic exhaust fans are often used where I live (Central Virginia).
Of course, better attic insulation is a good thing.
@Major Major Major Major:
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Going by that guy who bough Clarence Thomas these billionaires don’t seem to be all that smart. It’s not impossible that enough of them went full Underpants Gnome and convinced themselves that Default + ? = PROFIT!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
McCarthy’s problem is he wants the Speakership too badly and the Freedum Caucus leads him around by the nose with it. McCarthy also knows there is no alternative in the GOP to him as House Speaker so he can tell the Freedum Caucus this is what they are going vote on, or go find another Speaker because McCarthy will propose Matt Gatz replaces him as Speaker.
Jay
@Geminid:
in a lot of mid latitude areas, electric attic fans, more so on newer builds are quite common, but, the attic has good soffit ventilation.
This allows control of not only attic temps, but humidity.
The key thing though, is vents, whirlygigs and fans can only exhaust a bit more hot air from the attic as cold air allowed in. The older electric fans would strain when there was negative pressure in the attic, and this can cause a lot more problems than just venting the attic, (stack effect).
Basically, the whole attic/roof/vents/insulation/shingles/sealing/barriers needs to be looked at and some math done to figure out what will work and how well it will work.
Geminid
@Jay: The attics where I’ve seen exhaust fans also had adequate louvers at the top of the ridge, as per building code. I don’t see how under those circumstances there would be a problem with negative pressure.
I thought you had it right about exhaust fans being “a quick and cheap fix.” I think you overstate the problem of durability though.
eclare
@Major Major Major Major:
I don’t know how big the space is that you need to cool, but might also look at a window unit. Prob be a lot cheaper than installing an attic fan. I have an old house, and that’s all I have.
Anne Laurie
@eclare: Yes — window-unit air conditioners have improved a *lot* in the last ten years or so. With the new labelling requirements, it’s also easier to figure out how much energy you need to cool a particular space.
Depending on the structure of your house, and which rooms get used at particular times, it might be enough to install a box in the bedroom, maybe in the ‘office’ one or both partners use most when they’re home.
Another tip: Hanging a heavy blanket or quilt over the door of an air-conditioned room means the pets can let themselves in & out as they need, if nobody’s home to act as doorkeeper. That way you don’t have to cool down the whole house just to be sure they’re comfortable.
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Discovering which doors and/or windows to leave ajar in order to provide best cross-ventilation can help (as well as save energy costs), also too.
Ramalama
@gene108:
I know of 2 near-billionaires (their worth is close to the big B) who have vaycay homes in my little hamlet in Quebec province. Both of them are Canadian but also hold USA passports and run / inherited brand name businesses. Both of these gents supported Trump. One for sure had a red MAGA cap that I saw when I was providing tech support in his vacay condo.
When the Trump tax cuts were released to the rich, guess who got to enjoy them? My two Canadian near-billionaires. It was like a beer bong was transformed into a money bong and nearly choked them with funds.
Guess what happens when the US economy tanks? The USD loses its value. Guess what else happens? People with currencies from other countries get to buy American properties, companies, doo-dads on the cheap.
The rich are going to be fine. It’s everybody else…. and it’s always everybody else.
Ramalama
@West of the Rockies:
They talk about how the Presidency ages a man (so far, only dudes!) but inept Speakers, sheesh.
Wait, was Mitch McConnell ever un-turtle-like before working his soft-spoken skullduggery in the Senate?
evodevo
@Major Major Major Major:
Hot air automatically rises and collects at the top of the house no matter what the season…you need fans to blow it down and mix it…ask my cathedral ceiling how i know…
Ken
Solving for ?, I get “short selling”.
Pittsburgh Mike
These suggestions are silly. The House Republicans aren’t going to be able to come up with something they all vote for, much less something that could make it through a Democratic controlled Senate.
Biden’s too smart to negotiate against himself in this environment, so he’s not going to start negotiating with Kevin.
What’s going to happen is obvious — at some point the Dow will drop 1000-2000 points in a day, and a dozen Republicans will panic and vote with Democrats to increase the limit without any other conditions or with conditions so lame that they’re just a fig leaf. Kevin will be too scared to stop them.
The idea that Kevin can tank the bank balances of a bunch of retirees who vote, and still survive is laughable. Kevin can probably seen the inevitable, but he’s too cowardly and powerless to do anything about it.
Geminid
@Pittsburgh Mike: I think McCarthy would still control what comes to a floor vote, so there might need to be a discharge petition signed by a majority of the House.
One possible solution that intrigues me is a motion to remove McCarthy as Speaker. If the debt situation gets dire enough, I can see a handful of Republicans voting with the Democrats to reorganize the House under a new Speaker. That would not neccesarily be a Democrat; it could be someone like Tom Reed, a retired Republican willing to act as a caretaker who would allow vital legislation to reach the floor.
artem1s
McConnell’s back. He made it clear he would not allow a default or shut down over the debt ceiling. He is in control of his caucus. He will lean on the right people in the House and McCarthy can’t do anything about it.
McCarthy isn’t in control of anything. The rats have no loyalty to him or anything except their own pocketbooks. Hell, I’m betting some of the chaos agents end up jumping ship and vote with the Dems just to stick it to Kevin. For sure they will be calling for a vote to replace him. Probably before, during and after the voting on debt. Short term they will hurt the people they want to hurt. Long term it doesn’t pay to negotiate with them so hopefully Biden will stick to his guns…His response to questions about when will he negotiating with the GOP should the same as Nancy’s…
“Never. Is never good enough for you?”
No One You Know
@Doc Sardonic: That’s a new one!
* updates repertoire*
The one I learned was, “Couldn’t manage his way out of a brown paper bag with both ends open and instructions on the inside.”
Another Scott
@dmsilev: My Rep has receipts.
They’ve enacted all of 3 bills.
Short thread.
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@Chetan Murthy:
I think lots of the early rockers were either gay or just so sexually active anyone (everyone) attracted to them was good. So much sexuality in the music, it had to bust out all over their lives. Most of them didn’t give a shit for your social rulz at all…
Bo Diddley, for example… got a whole set of R&R beats named for his rhythms…
J R in WV
@evodevo:
We moved into our house in 1994 after starting the build in 1991. Mostly friends and neighbors, had our accounting firm compute payroll, workers comp, SS deductions, etc. Cost extra, but my buddies were covered, Lots of them wouldn’t have qualified for SS retirement without those quarters of payments!
Great room is 35×20 with vaulted round steel exposed rafters on 19′ radius IIRC. Two big black Casablanca fans have been running continuously since being powered up back in 1994, one sucking up and one blowing down, except for annual stoppage to clean the blades. Peak of the ceiling in the great room is 18 feet or so, I have scaffolding I can put up to work cleaning rafters. Or could back when…
Whether the HVAC is running the gas furnace or the AC, those fans keep the air moving. We have a much smaller ceiling fan in the 18×18 bedroom with a 9 foot ceiling, we turn it on as we need it to cool things down at bedtime, Usually, even if the AC has been on by 11 pm or so we can open a window in the north uphill end of the house and get cool woodland breeze across the whole house. Not always, but usually. House is surrounded by huge boulders covered with moss and ferns. No cell service, land line only.
robtrim
In Dynastic China the Emperor’s household was eventually run by the Castrati, the castrated males who were trusted to serve the Emperor and his harem.
America has probably reached that same unfortunate place in history. Kevin McCarthy is but one example. Our former president (and faux Emperor) Donald Trump achieved the collective castration of the Republican party in less than a decade. Is it any wonder that McCarthy is obeisant to Marjorie Taylor Green and the other gun-toting, trash-talking harpies in the GOP?
KCSteve
WTF does “FTFNYTimes” mean?