McCarthy needed Dem votes to maintain a hold on the speakership, but the concessions he would have needed to make in order to get them would have meant making himself incredibly vulnerable to a career-ending primary challenge. The political incentives don’t line up.

In Florida, the alternative is a (very expensive) state-funded program that acts as an insurer of last resort. With so many insurance firms cutting their losses and leaving the market, though, I suspect that program is about to be severely overloaded, while many Floridians also find their homes suddenly unaffordable. If there’s going to be a solution, it’s going to have to come from the state, but given that the party in power there is still firmly committed to pretending climate change is a hoax, I wouldn’t hold my breath. My guess is that there’s going to be a lot of migration away from Florida and other Republican-dominated coastal states as issues with cost and availability of insurance force homeowners to make some hard financial decisions.

At the moment, the voting-age American public seems to be split into pretty even thirds, with one third being slavering fascists, one third being generally opposed to the first third, and a final third who are either totally apathetic or steadfastly refuse to acknowledge any difference between the other two thirds.

Yeah, I’m not optimistic that a KBI under the leadership of Kris “K” Kobach is going to be in much hurry to investigate small town police corruption at the behest of a fundraiser for another MAGA nutjob.

Thigh who knows, maybe ol’ Kris is too busy virtue signaling his blood-and-soil, anti-immigrant values to the xenophobes that make up his primary constituency to actually dirty his hands with the work of being attorney-general. Wouldn’t be the first time he was too busy trying to get on TV to do his job.

I’m fond of Cheeto Benito myself.

Granted that all we have to go on is hearsay and speculation… but the fact that in one hand Obama commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence, while one the other hand former Obama staffers who otherwise would have been broadly aligned with Snowden’s interests in disclosing domestic intelligence operations still speak about him with vehement disdain years after leaving government suggests to me that he sold the Russians something particularly damaging.

To play devil’s advocate, when Social Security was established (bringing with it the concept of a “retirement age”), the age of eligibility was deliberately set such that less than half of Americans would live long enough to draw on it. The clear expectation was that you would work until you couldn’t anymore.

That said, in an era when changes in life expectancy are starting to take on a K-shaped distribution and labor force participation has been on a long steady decline, tying governmental income support to age and employment duration is becoming distributionally regressive. I’d much rather have some sort of UBI system that everyone can benefit from.

I believe her chief aide is one of Pelosi’s children, and people read into that manipulation by Nancy herself – usually along the lines of “she’s propping up Feinstein to keep out a progressive replacement!”

Feinstein belongs in a memory care ward rather than the Senate, but it doesn’t take nefarious scheming by everyone’s favorite bogeywoman to explain a cantankerous dementia patient refusing to accept their limitations and step away from something that they find comfortable and familiar.

As always, the radical flank is perfectly happy to leave unimportant issues like “can we help people in small ways now even if helping them in the bigger ways we’d prefer isn’t achievable within the limits of our current democratic system?” And “how do we stop the right-wing fascist takeover of the country?” by the wayside order to focus on the far more critical problem of enforcing maximal ideological purity.

Because, frustratingly, Biden isn’t the sort of LBJ-esque power player who can haul miserable DINOs like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into the Oval Office to threaten them with political death unless they fall into line with his agenda. The fact of the matter is that just like in Obama’s first term, Democrats really only had control of Congress for two years, and by a margin so slim that they needed unanimity to actually advance rules changes in the Senate, let alone legislation. That meant that Biden’s entire agenda was bottlenecked by two of the most worthless assholes in the whole party, people who are definitely guilty of the short-sighted political gamesmanship that you want to ascribe to the entire party. Their obstructionism meant that, because of Senate rules, there’s only one chance or year to pass major legislation, and even then it has to ostensibly be budget-related.

Despite all that, Biden and the rest of the Democrats did manage to get major legislation on climate enacted, in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Was it the whole Green New Deal? No, Manchin the coal baron wasn’t going to vote for that. But it’s still major change in a positive direction. Your frustration that there hasn’t been more is misdirected at the party generally, when it should be aimed at two senators in particular – and the solution to that is not to throw up your hands and declare “both sides are the same!” It’s to get out the vote for more progressive legislators to make those assholes politically irrelevant.

I think this is a more cynical view than can be supported by facts in evidence. For sure, in Ye Olden Days when the parties weren’t actually all that far apart, there was some level of building up a bogeyman to get out the base while everybody was friendly behind closed doors. But especially in the era of Trump, I think most congressional Democrats (leftwards of Machin and Sinema, at least) are genuinely afraid of what a second Trump turn would mean for the country, not least because it would likely mean a practical end to democratic processes at the federal level. Hard to benefit from the bogeyman when the bogeyman has made your presence in politics impossible-to-illegal.

Reform-minded legislators have previously floated the idea of rewriting the Farm Bill to favor smaller family operations instead of agri-conglomerates like Con-Agra – to near-universal dissent from farmers. No matter the reality of the situation, conservative media has them convinced that they’re just one good season away from riches, and they don’t want to lose their subsidies when that happens.

Does it, though? In the past the argument was that aggregators like Google were stealing site traffic by showing large excepts or summaries of the articles they linked to, and I could understand that, but the new Canadian law seems like it wants to attach a fee to simply showing a hyperlink. That’s fundamentally contrary to the way that the Internet was designed to work, and as the examples of blocking in the article demonstrate, it seems to confuse who is providing value to who in this specific instance. I take issue with the big platforms co-opting the open Internet, but penalizing them for showing links off their sites to news organizations seems to be the exact wrong thing to do about it.

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We weren’t better off in the 50s

That’s the thing, though – in these sorts of communities, they arguably were. As the old lead mining heartland of the nation, the southern half of Missouri isn’t far off rural West Virginia coal country or the Rust Belt in terms of post-industrial decline. I have my own theories about why that area is the way it is (and I suspect endemic low-level exposure to lead mining waste might be part of it) but at a fundamental level it’s not surprising that these communities would try to reach back into a mostly-imaginary past to reclaim the trappings of middle-class comfort. The present just doesn’t have anything to offer them.

Good on 'em. I’m not looking forward to coming flood of terrible reality television, but hopefully between this and the writer’s strike, the people doing the work in the industry can get a more equitable stake.

This hits close to home. My dad grew up in a house about a half-mile from the creek mentioned in the article; my grandparents lived in that house for almost thirty years. That said, I think they were “uphill” in the watershed from the creek, and the only unusual cancer in my family is from my own generation, which was never exposed. Grandma and Grandpa both had cancer in their senior years (brain and colon, respectively) but neither died as a result of it – Grandma’s was so slow moving that they just left it be for fifteen years until she passed from other causes! – and the health problems my dad and his siblings have are mostly hereditary in nature.

Off-topic, but wow, what a spaghetti bowl of adjectives that first sentence is. What does “first non -incumbent gay Republican elected” even mean as a string of qualifiers? I can just about parse it, but the phrasing makes it read as though all the incumbent gay Republicans before him were straight when they won their first elections, instead of just closeted.

SpaceX’s Starship launch was much-memed-upon but it honestly went as well or better than could be expected given the development approach the company takes. That said, it’s clear that the test cadence is being rushed at Elon’s behest (launching without a proper pad deluge system, for instance) and they’ve reached a size of rocket that having something go wrong in flight could cause serious damage, and isn’t just an opportunity to deploy funny acronyms and giggle.

That said, SpaceX is one of the few things he’s doing that isn’t a total clusterfuck, and that’s got a lot to do with the much more competent people he has running the company under his nominal leadership. Gwynne Shotwell has been very well-regarded and tends to do a good job of insulating the rest of the company from Elmo’s dumbest whims.

Creepy middle-aged white South African man may be racist, more at 11!