https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-small-town-that-saved-its-only-grocery-store-by-buying-it?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

This feels like… socialism in the heartland. 🙂

https://ladylibertie.substack.com/p/fafo-the-maga-meltdown-is-here-and

«So what do we do when these newly-bewildered GOP voters start realizing they got conned? How do we handle the Great Republican Panic of 2025?

With care.

Yes, it’s tempting to scream, “WE TOLD YOU SO” and let them marinate in their bad choices. But that doesn’t flip votes—it just sends them running back into the arms of Fox News. Instead, we need to be the cool, collected voice of reality.

A little sympathy goes a long way: “Yeah, it sucks that your mom lost Medicaid. Let’s talk about how we fix that.”

Help them connect the dots: “It’s not just bad luck, it’s GOP policy. You deserve better.”

Offer a way out: “You don’t have to stay loyal to people who are screwing you over.”

Because here’s the truth: We don’t need all of them to wake up. Just a few percent. 3.5% to be precise. That’s all it takes to flip an election, dismantle Trumpism, and start rebuilding what these ghouls have burned down.»

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine

I never liked Ronald Reagan. He did a lot damage to this country, and it’s continuing to unfold.

One of the things I blamed him for was ending the Fairness Doctrine and thus enabling the growth of Fox News.

But… I don’t think the FCC has jurisdiction over cable, and Fox  managed to get themselves into the standard cable bundle. And now cable itself is dying (except as an internet service provider). So I wonder if we’d be in the same situation today even if Reagan hadn’t killed the Fairness Doctrine.

One could argue that Fox was able to legitimize themselves before broadcast really died, and that’s how they wound up in the standard cable bundle, but, really, who watches them any more but Boomers and older Gen Xers? Everybody else is on Twitter and Facebook and their favorite far-right podcast or other website.

“You were lied to” is still correct, but I think it might be independent of Reagan.

«“Every Republican senator who voted to confirm him as secretary of Health and Human Services knew that this was going to happen,” Schrier said, referring to the child who died from measles.»

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kim-schrier-rfk-jr-vaccines-measles_n_67c0a705e4b0702663293e54

This is a brave, brave woman to let a story like this be written about her.

«Cooper did not want to think about what happened three months prior but her mind went there anyway.  To the voting booth in Baldwin’s town hall, where she filled out every part of the ballot before turning to the box that said “Presidential.” She recalled staring at it for 15 minutes.

She did not want to vote for Trump. Cooper hated what he said about women and hated how he treated them. Her family always said the women who accused the president of sexual assault had either made it up or deserved it. Cooper heard them and kept her own experience a secret, thinking that they might feel the same way about her.

She voted for Joe Biden in 2020, her first time casting a ballot in a presidential election. But life felt more complicated these days. Her mortgage was too expensive, groceries were nearly $400 a month, and one single cycle of IVF could cost more than 10 percent of her annual household income.

Trump, at a campaign stop an hour and a half south of her, had promised to make IVF free. She knew that from a video clip she saw on TikTok. And she had believed him.

She also believed him when he said that Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration that suggested mass cuts to the federal workforce, was not his plan.

So Cooper filled in the bubble next to his name, thinking of the daughter she wanted. She planned to name her Charlotte.»

https://wapo.st/3CYacpv (gift)

Trying to figure out whether I should keep my subscription to the WaPo. I have a subscription to the WSJ even though I know the editorial section is garbage.

«A school-age child has died of measles in West Texas, the first death from the disease in a decade in the United States. The child had not been vaccinated against measles, according to the city of Lubbock’s health department.»

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/person-dies-measles-west-texas-outbreak-rcna193812

So now the family has experienced the loss of a child and, presumably, may experience “a certain amount of social opprobrium.”

🙁

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hellwig-DMA-Helpers-Removed

Huh.

«The House’s resolution lays out a $1.5 trillion floor for spending cuts across committees with a target of $2 trillion, puts a $4.5 trillion ceiling on the deficit impact of any GOP plan to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, and includes $300 billion in additional spending for the border and defense and a $4 trillion debt limit increase.»

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5164108-house-republicans-budget-resolution-trump-agenda/

(What is the current debt limit?

«The federal debt limit was reinstated on January 2, 2025, at $36.1 trillion. That total comprised $28.8 trillion in debt held by the public and $7.3 trillion in intergovernmental accounts. The statutory debt limit constrains nearly all federal debt, including both debt held by the public (mostly Treasury securities sold via auctions) and intragovernmental debt (mainly federal trust funds, such as those for Social Security, Medicare, and federal retirement systems).»

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN12045

(Pretty sure that “intergovernmental debt” is how we borrow money from Social Security, btw.)

Why can’t journalists include the base figure when things change? It’s not like we yutzes know this stuff of the top of our heads. Ok back to The Hill story:)

«The resolution directs the Energy and Commerce Committee — which has jurisdiction over Medicaid — to find at least $880 billion in cuts, a figure that some lawmakers said could not be reached without significant slashes to the social safety net program.

…

“Do a word search for yourself,” Johnson said Tuesday morning. “It doesn’t even mention Medicaid in the bill, so that’s an important point.”»

Uh huh. This is why people think politicians are liars. Everything is done by implication.

So, there’s law, and there’s regulations. The legislature passes laws and then individual government agencies implement the laws by making regulations. The *law* may not mention a thing, but at the level below the law, which the public doesn’t generally see because guess who doesn’t report on it, the thing most definitely gets “mentioned”.

(Sometimes, even then, the thing doesn’t get mentioned, but it happens anyway. This is how we implement racism now. It’s all pushed down to the state and county level. Or the thing is a blanket rule with exceptions for rural areas (the poor farmer! (who just happens to be white)), or exceptions for certain types of labor which just, purely by coincidence, happen to be mostly non-white (e.g., farm *labor* and domestic “help”).)

«Sending a ComfortUnit into this situation was morally irresponsible and a clear violation of contract.»

(77% through “Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries” by Martha Wells.)

Everything hits different now. The quoted sentence was written in a world where “morally irresponsible” and “violation of contract” mean things, but here we are, in a time when 50.1% of the US electorate believe lol nothing matters.