US Politics January 2018: "You All Just Got A Lot Richer"

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/USkCsrO9sz4/hqdefault.jpg

That's pretty much the perfect wordless punchline. Kudos.

https://instagram.com/p/BeN15oangH-/

much xps, re feck or lack thereof: My rage at this shutdown, as the apotheosis of this administration’s flagrant and treasonous contempt for everything I actually love about my country, is almost greater than even I, internet hardman archetype, can comprehend; so I guess I don’t have any expectations at all that anyone should be able to address this in the terms it merits, certainly not without risking criminal charges.

I mean nobody’s gonna pass my smell test for “messaging” on the events of the last two weeks unless they wind up in shackles on a secret service paddy wagon, so I don’t really differentiate between the varieties of zwieback the Dems are feeding whatever they think their base is. That is completely unimportant to me atm.

The fact that someone on GOP.com put up a page with the actual title of 'The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards' is the perfect crossing of hilarity and despair.

Yikes, that family has some bad genes.

"All the contractors are still getting paid" I thought they weren't?

Depends on how the appropriations are obligated, etc.

Graham: “Every time we have a proposal, it is only yanked back by staff members. As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating on immigration, we are going nowhere.”

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) January 21, 2018

I should ask my pal at one of the National Labs what they’re doing tomorrow

i am less concerned with the specifics of the "messaging" than with its effect. the democrats have stumbled, without really intending to, and aided by republican incompetence, into a decisive state of revolt. if they were revolting against a competent leadership - if, for instance, they were attempting to take a stand against someone like erdogan - they would already have lost. this isn't that kind of revolt.

whatever people say about it, the most important thing is to convince people, enough people, that we are right in doing this, that this is worth doing, that the fantasy of some sort of bloodless coup is impossible. convince people to, whatever is wrong, to continue to focus their blame for it on the republicans, as they have been doing, rather than shifting their blame to the democrats. and this isn't something that can or will be done by democratic leadership, because they are reviled. they're not opinion leaders, they're not going to be opinion leaders.

if the democratic leadership can't get at least enough conditional support from people to win this crisis, i see no hope for resolution to the ongoing failure state.

Mike Pence is a complete shitbird and I hate him with an intensity that involves every molecule in my body

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/370008-pence-blasts-senate-democrats-in-overseas-speech-to-troops

i see no hope for resolution to the ongoing failure state

digging the nation out of the political hole we've slid into will be a long process and most likely just a partial success, since the US has always had horrible aspects to its ongoing politics.

oh and the coups in my fantasies are not remotely bloodless fwiw

I really don't think the public at large cares about a government shutdown. Or, given approval levels, about government much at all these days. And I also agree with predictions that, the way the news cycle moves these days, it may very well be forgotten by November. Or by next month, if and when it happens again. I mean, we've hit the stage where settlements with porn stars are just another day at the office. Just think about that. Just think about any other president posing with a porn star for a picture. And that's like the c-story on your average Friday. That's where we are today. Until things change or don't in November, it's just going to be more of the exhausting shitty same.

Anyway, how can Graham blame Miller by name for scuttling every deal, yet in the same breath remain hopeful there will soon be a deal? He's pinpointed the problem. It's a vicious cycle.

As a corollary, I only care about you in the abstract, as well.

I called the products of my last seven bowel movements and they also hate Mike Pence, because he’s giving them a bad name

does anybody care about anybody else anymore except in the abstract?

I want to start every post about this administration with "As a coronary ..."

I think when Trump is gone and we return to some semblance of "normal," I think people will care about that.

Whut

Stars of NBC's "The West Wing" will hold a one-night-only reading of "All the President's Men" in Los Angeles https://t.co/dVJ50l5TgH pic.twitter.com/14zbf0Uacf

— CNN (@CNN) January 21, 2018

Stars of NBC's "The West Wing" will hold a one-night-only reading of "All the President's Men"

Next, the re-united cast of the 1980s hit film "Clueless" will join together for a one-time reading of "Fire and Fury", thus doubling the potent word magic directed at our president from afar.

oh and the coups in my fantasies are not remotely bloodless fwiw

Whut

🐦[Stars of NBC’s "The West Wing" will hold a one-night-only reading of "All the President’s Men" in Los Angeles https://t.co/dVJ50l5TgH🕸 pic.twitter.com/14zbf0Uacf🕸
— CNN (@CNN) January 21, 2018🕸]🐦

It’s funny looking back that a big part of Team America was “can you believe these dumb hollywood actors don’t want to go to war in Iraq?!”

reductive af but sometimes i think one of the main reasons trump has supporters under the age of 40 is because of those two SP assholes

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-exactly-this-shutdown-means-agency-by-agency

https://www.stripes.com/news/here-s-what-we-know-about-how-the-shutdown-is-affecting-the-military-dod-civilians-and-veterans-1.507494

it's only reductive insofar as it's actually true. there are a lot of dumbfuck assholes who got a taste of cultural confirmation through Parker & Stone.

xpost

^^Yeah, they are modern pioneers of trolling.

i hate people who relish in being dicks and that seems to be what P&S, DJT, & the entire GOP excel at. off topic but it's the pyschological environment we're in....

Come on, they're all just joking, all the time. Why do you have to be so uptight and PC? Loosen up a little.

trouble at the nyt

By the way, if you're wondering why coverage of the huge marches yesterday seems kind of muted, it's because those hundreds of thousands weren't sitting in diners in small-town America, and therefore don't count. Also many of them were women.

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 21, 2018

This is the Krugman that liberals want

Those exhaustive, exhausting profiles of trump supporters would be like if every newspaper and news outlet for an entire year sent reporters to the Pacific Northwest talking to people who believe in Bigfoot. I don't think you would get more from the hundredth article than you got in the first.

I got asked to write a piece about Trump voters. So I called a bunch of people in Staten Island and LA. I come back, the editor goes "no, we wanted a piece about the rurals." me: right but that's not really how the numbers work. Story dies on the vine.

— Linda Tirado (@KillerMartinis) January 21, 2018

And now, some light reading.

A POLITICO analysis reveals that the investigations now involve 100s of people in Washington, Moscow and around the world. Taken together, they illuminate the way investigators are assembling the pieces of the Russia puzzle. Click for searchable database. https://t.co/Mei9P8pFvz

— Carrie Budoff Brown (@cbudoffbrown) January 21, 2018

pretty

Like an 8bit stomach.

I work for a government contractor supporting the Federal Aviation Administration. Just got a text from my manager saying that we are NOT authorized to go into work today.

I was around the world of government contracting for previous shutdowns. Everybody handles it their own way.

Some hourly employees will not work and thus will not be paid. Some salaried employees will get paid, and the company will eat it as overhead (up to a point). Other salaried employees will be asked to take leave. Others will be asked to do busywork for the company itself, do training, or do work for non-Federal customers.

Some of it depends on the nature of the contract and the nature of the government client. A fixed-price contract is billed and paid for the duration of the contract, regardless of how many or how few hours are worked. A time-and-materials contract is billed and paid for actual hours and labor rates.

Another wrinkle: there are some "non-appropriated" government functions that do not depend on funding from congress. During the last shutdown I was working for the Federal Acquisition Service, which is not funded by appropriation (funded instead by fees). I could theoretically have kept working, but it was determined to be NAGL.

i'm just glad the corporate tax rate dropped from 40% to 20% before the united states could no longer fund the federal government's daily operations : )

So hey, smart people itt: what happens if these jokers are perpetually unable to agree on a budget?

Those exhaustive, exhausting profiles of trump supporters would be like if every newspaper and news outlet for an entire year sent reporters to the Pacific Northwest talking to people who believe in Bigfoot.

Honestly, some newspaper should start doing exactly this, week after week, and see if at some point readers get the point they're trying to make

someone will blink eventually xp

Dems are gonna cave, right?

xpost I mean, I get that that's what's expected to happen and what's happened historically, but as far as the federal government is concerned, I'm pretty much done making any assumptions based on past observations.

there's such a crazy partisan divide in this country right now. any Dem who 'caves' probably knows they're going to get raked over the coals for it. it's the GOP who's in charge right now, the longer this goes the worse this is for them, right?

I don't think there's a hard legal or constitutional limit on continuing resolutions. They can go month-to-month or week-to-week effectively forever.

As for how long they can do shutdown operations (with only "essential" staff)? That I do not know.

Perhaps Democrats will "cave" in the sense that they will have to vote for something eventually. Something that is less than everything you'd want, but more than Friday's offer.

Honestly I know that Dem spinelessness is among ILX's favorite pinatas, but I'm sort of glad they went to the mat this time over DACA, instead of deciding this-is-not-the-hill-to-die-on.

Will you be satisfied if they agree to possibly having some kind of vote on DACA at some point in the Senate and never in the House?