Monday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour Thread

Maybe some Rudy news after the holiday!

Power of the Purse

Abbott says he’ll veto funds for the Texas legislature until it restricts voting based on Trump’s lies https://t.co/lw7PmBjyCu

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) May 31, 2021

I don't even know precisely what this means in practical terms, but when people ask "WHAT CAN THE DEMOCRATS DOOOOOOOOO?!?!?!" the answer is, always, they control the presidency, the House, and the Senate, and at the very least can get some bills through with reconciliation. You know, the ones with ALL THE MONEY. When you control that, there are a lot of things you can do.

I WILL FIGHT FOR YOOOOOOOOOOU

Lots of Democratic politicians say versions of this, but they're usually not quite clear just who or what they are fighting.

Probably Mothra!

Lunch Thread

Grill something.

I can't stand it, I know you planned it

Use the power you have.

As the clock got closer to the midnight deadline, Democratic lawmakers in Texas decided it was time for dramatic action to block passage of a massive overhaul of the state’s election laws. The measure had seemed all but certain to pass, but with a little more than an hour to go before the deadline Democrats staged a walkout, depriving their Republican colleagues of the 100-member quorum needed to pass the measure.

I Am Not Beautiful And Cool Anymore, Burn It All Down

Sadly a common life path among our elites.

Sad and a bit funny when they retired by 70 and couldn't, necessarily, burn it all down.

Monday Morning

I hope all the haters and losers have a great day!

Sunday Night

Rock on.

Sunday Happy Hour

One of the good Mondays tomorrow. Mattress sales!

Not Cowardice

A favorite West Wing brain narrative, though selectively applied, is that doing the Right Thing is hard and doing the Wrong Thing is cowardly and easy.

.@RepDonBeyer: "Senate Republicans took political cowardice to a new level today.... Mitch McConnell admitted behind closed doors that his motivation for obstructing this measure was entirely political calculation."

— Brandi Buchman (@BBuchman_CNS) May 28, 2021

Vaccine Machine Still Too Slow

The basic story is that the UK had a bit of a head start, had a pretty good vaccination program, ran into supply problems for 4-6 weeks, then got back on track. The US started a bit later, picked up the pace fairly quickly, especially after the last guy left, has more supply than it knows what to do with, and...

The US still leads in % fully dosed, but probably won't anymore in about 10 days. The point is not that it is a race between these two countries, just comparing the records of two countries that, despite mixed records on everything else, did implement top vaccination programs.

(source)

The real problem in the US isn't the overall speed, which is probably fine if not as good as it could be, but the local problems. Only 35% have a first dose in Louisiana.

Lunch Thread

Hope you are enjoying your long weekend!

More Guns, More Guns

It is the guns, mostly, but also the culture.

While gun sales have been climbing for decades — they often spike in election years and after high-profile crimes — Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked.

In March last year, federal background checks, a rough proxy for purchases, topped one million in a week for the first time since the government began tracking them in 1998. And the buying continued, through the protests in the summer and the election in the fall, until a week this spring broke the record with 1.2 million background checks.

Morning Thread

I hope you survived Saturday night without rockin'.

Saturday Evening

I got nothin".

Saturday Afternoon

Get your Saturday on.

Happy "Suck On This" Day!

18 years! Time flies.

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
...
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
...

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.

iPhone Rumors

Related, but once upon a time there were iPhone rumor sites that were filled with absolutely crazy rumors/predictions, like "THE NEXT IPHONE WILL READ YOUR MIND." I'm exaggerating a bit, and most of it was silly, but, again, there was this optimism about the latest technology trends. Big things coming! Now it's (and this isn't on Apple, just the whole industry) just trying to make a big deal out of minor cosmetic or slight functional changes.

Minor functional improvements are good! But no mindreading. Or, specifically, not the kind of optimism which makes people think the mindreading might be coming.

Almost Miss The Dumb TechnoUtopianism

Most of it was dumb and a lot of it was damaging, but there was something at least optimistic in the last decade, when people seemed to believe a new app, or a new invention called "the bus," could change the world. Uber, but for hamburgers. A juicer, but connected to the internet. Whatever it was.

Now it's just surveillance and shitcoins.