Right now, it’s 50 R and 46 D with the 4 Independents (Sanders, King, Sinema, Manchin) caucusing with the Democrats to give it a 50/50 tie.

The Senate is currently 51-49. The Democratic Caucus has 51 members.

Stephen Miller is an advisor to Trump and is probably a psychopath. I don’t use that label lightly either.

When a normal person gets genuinely angry, their facial expressions and body language convey the anger too. It’s a natural reaction humans have when experiencing emotions and it’s tough to hide or fake.

Stephen Miller raises his voice, he uses an indignant tone, he makes aggressive motions with his body, but his face shows no change in expression at all. It’s not just this clip either, he’s like this all the time. He’s generally good at lying and changing topics during normal interviews, but he was cornered here and fell back to “pretend to be angry and change the topic.” Clearly this reporter was having none of it.

I find it frankly hilarious that all these ships are apparently designed so that damage to just about any part of the ship has a high likelihood of causing a bridge panel, often used by the captain, commanders, and lieutenants, to explode right into the faces of the most important people on the ship.

You would think after reading the 20th captain’s log with variations of “Ensign Ricky died after a bridge panel exploded in his face following minor torpedo damage to Shuttle Bay 3,” Starfleet might consider some redesigns and retrofittings.

I was tilling my garden a month or two ago and got to one end, turned around, and casually strolling right through the middle of the plot, literally 10 feet in front of me and a very loud tiller, was a young buck. Completely unafraid of me or the tiller.

On another day, I was using a chainsaw to cut down some buckthorn and that same buck was within 5 feet of me eating the leaves on the trees I just cut down. Again completely unafraid.

I put up a small net around the perimeter a few days before I put my plants in and they knocked it over, tore the net, and bent the poles. There wasn’t even anything in the garden! And to top it all off, there were several fresh piles of poop.

So I put in 8 ft. T poles every 4 feet around the perimeter, doubled up the net, secured it at the top and the bottom, and they haven’t gotten in yet (although I watched one of them biting at it). Unfortunately the neighbors are feeding these deer, so they have almost no fear of people.

I have a pact with the spiders in my house. If I spot them running across the floor or on the ceiling or tucked away in a corner, they’re not bothering me, so I won’t bother them. If I see one in an inconvenient place like the dinner table or hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, I gently relocate them outdoors.

But…if I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I feel one crawling up my arm, it’s broken the pact, and it can’t be trusted to leave me alone anymore, so it gets a quick and painless death.

I was once very eagerly awaiting a FedEx package that required a signature. I basically looked out the window every 30 seconds to make sure I didn’t miss him.

5 or 6 o’clock rolls around and I get a notification that the package could not be delivered because “the business was closed”. I lived in a rural area with no businesses for several miles, and I’m certainly not a business. The driver clearly just decided he didn’t want to deliver any more packages that day and just made up bullshit excuses for the remaining packages.

I contacted FedEx support and it was exactly as everyone knows it to be. “I’m so sorry that was your experience! Now go away.”

It was delivered the next day.

The role of a district court judge is to do two things:

1. Apply existing precedent to individual cases to the greatest extent possible.
2. Set new precedent only when absolutely necessary because the facts of the case don’t align well to existing precedent.

Cannon has basically decided to do the exact opposite of these two rules by pretending that the facts of this case are so incredibly unprecedented that she has to throw out the rulebook and set new precedents on everything.

Literally the only unusual thing about this case is that the defendant, a private citizen who currently gets free government security protection for the rest of his life, used to be a president. That’s it. Everything else about this case is straightforward obstruction of justice and willful retention of national security information.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/17/americans-are-actually-pretty-happy-with-their-finances

I get a lot of people are struggling, but you can’t claim that the average person isn’t doing well when 63% of Americans rate their financial situation as “good” or “very good.”

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It wouldn’t. THC has to be decarboxylated via heating before it has any psychoactive effects.

If you eat an ounce of weed, you’d just get a tummy ache. If you heat up an ounce of weed in the oven just hot enough to decarboxylate the THC before you eat it, you’ll be experiencing your tummy ache on an entirely different plane of existence.

We’re not in a recession. Economic growth last quarter was almost 5% (which is massive) and growth has been positive for the last 4 quarters. The average quarterly growth over the last several decades has been closer to 2%.

The economy is doing just fine. Frankly, most people hear their neighbors complain about the economy, so they think the economy is bad, so they complain about the economy, and the result is everyone thinking the economy is terrible when it objectively isn’t.

Inflation is relatively high by recent historical standards, but it’s really not that high anymore and hasn’t been for most of 2023. People got sticker shock during the height of it last year and haven’t forgotten. But the labor market is still tight, people who gave up trying to find work a long time ago are entering the market and getting jobs again, wages continue to rise, business investment is up, and small businesses are being created at a historically rapid pace.

When pollsters ask people, “how is your personal financial situation?”, most people are answering “good.” When those same people are asked, “how do you think everyone else’s financial situation is?”, they scream “TERRIBLE!” That doesn’t mean there aren’t people suffering, but things aren’t nearly as gloomy as everyone insists they are.

That and the fact that there’s a not insignificant number of people who are center-right politically and identify as Republican but don’t like Trump or the recent direction of the party. It’s not a majority or even a plurality of Republicans, but it’s enough to have an impact in close races.

Biden attacking “MAGA Republicans” instead of “Republicans” gives the center-right voters a permission structure to support Democrats because the choice gets reframed from “us (Democrats) vs. you (Republicans)” to “us (the sane ones) vs. them (the crazies)”.

Rattlesnakes and alligators (and non-unionized automobile manufacturing facilities)

I assume this is the one? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F8lJMpZXYAEBjHt?format=jpg&name=900x900

Here’s a ProPublica article about that pediatrician’s reason for getting involved: https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-join-political-battle-over-abortion-laws

Her rationale is basically that young children (and teenagers) can get pregnant and want to end the pregnancy or get birth control to prevent it. Part of her job is supporting their choice to do so.

But I see what you mean. It almost seems like it could be the start of a satirical flyer trying to paint the pro-choice position as extreme.

Nancy Mace claimed, with a straight face, in an interview with Jake Tapper that she’s spoken to Democrats in Congress that say they trust Jim Jordan.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/10/11/mace-house-speaker-jordan-democrats-scalise-jake-tapper-lead-vpx.cnn

I burst out in laughter. I honestly had not laughed that long in a very long time.

Jake Tapper finally got her to admit that they “trusted Jim Jordan more than Kevin McCarthy.” Not exactly a high bar there.

Biden said he saw the pictures.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/meeting-with-jewish-leaders-biden-confirms-reports-that-hamas-beheaded-israeli-children/

“Allegably”

Nope, he got them their sick days. He kept the pressure on even after imposing the contract. Directly from the IBEW union:

https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid

“Howdy” for me. I’m from and live in the Northeast.

Started saying it ironically on work calls to break up the monotony of saying “Hey” when the host joined the meeting and said hello. It was pretty much just a joke at first. Now it’s about 50% of what I say in response to someone joining the meeting saying hello.

Honestly, I kind of like it. It’s folksy, friendly, simple, and informal. It’s slipped out a couple of times when guests arrive at a family party and are walking in the door and saying their hellos, but it’s mostly relegated to work meetings.

A few of my coworkers have even started doing it occasionally, so it seems like it’s catching on.

The thing to remember about most Republicans (and Republican politicians especially) is that any arguments they throw out in pursuit of a particular goal only apply to that goal.

Impeachment of Trump was bad, so they said the Speaker didn’t have the power, that impeachment should be only for extreme situations, that high crimes and misdemeanors means you have to break the law to be impeached, that Democrats were on a mission to impeach Trump since he was elected.

But now, impeachment of Biden is good, so the Speaker clearly has the power to initiate an inquiry, that vague, shady insinuations with no hard evidence is sufficient to impeach, that they’re definitely not on a witch-hunt to impeach Biden despite investigating him from the moment they got their majority and moving forward to impeach with zero actual evidence.

You can point out their hypocrisy and they won’t defend themselves. Some of them might even try to convince you the situation is somehow different, but most don’t care. They set their sights on a goal and backfill an argument to justify it.