and if we wait for whomever id financially responsible to pay they will scream about him not doing anything and why is it taking so long. The GOP echo chamber needs a constant stream of outrage.

Right. The obvious answer is to fix it ASAP and then spend the years/decades in court and in negotiations to recoup the money from the responsible parties.

Which is what they are doing.

Biden's quiet competence is sometimes at odds with the outrage machine.

dola:

I spoke too soon about it being clear that it was a horrible accident.

According to my Facebook feed, "multiple intel sources" have "confirmed' that it was a "Chinese cyber attack" designed to "divide the US along the Mason-Dixon line" in order to "accelerate our civil war."

I'm not sure where the "cyber" comes in. Maybe they remotely shut off the ship's power?

You mean they're off the "DEI Mayor" line of fault assignment?

i think you need to get your Facebook feed looked at (not by the Chinese though)

Some of the Twitter takes on this are scary. It's like 30% of our country just lives in an alternate reality.

I'm not on Twitter often but I've seen the Chinese attack, I've seen it blamed on some new world order globalist Satanism, I've seen it blamed on democrat sabotage, covid lockdowns, illegal immigrants. Just about everything.

Hey, don't be racist ... you left out the Jews (as part of a the larger CIA/ISIS/Mossad conspiracy)

They already had those bots ready for the Russian concert attack so reusing them was just a matter of tweaking the scripts.

My bad, I forgot that people with space lasers are capable of anything.

It's really hard to tell how much of it is real. Chinese and Russian troll accounts still pump out hundreds of millions of fake social media posts every month. And surely a lot of those are accepted and then spread by real morons. But I like to tell myself fewer real people believe this stuff than it seems.

Disney and DeSantis have settled their yearslong dispute | CNN Business

You must have skipped the poll number discussions

So we're going to end up right back where we were before war against Disney started.

Funny how Disantis seems to have largely took a step back from his attack on anything "woke" as soon as his campaign ended.

John Eastman has been disbarred in CA for his role for jan 6. not official yet as it has to go to the CA Supreme Court for the final verdict. His co-conspirator Jeffrey Clark disbarment hearing also going on today

Don't know whether to place this in the basketball thread or here. Representative Matt maddock, apparently rated as Michigan's most conservative representative, apparently thought he was on to finding Biden's "Secret Invasion of illegals" when he photographed and posted pictures of the buses that were being used at detroit's airport and getting a police escort. He sent the photos to the new head of michigan's gop, after the last one was kicked out for being too maga crazy, who then posted them himself without checking to find out who was in the buses.


Turns out it was the Gonzaga's basketball team in town for the next round of the NCAA's:


meidastouch.com

And this will do nothing to get him to take a step back and think, "hey maybe I'm dumbass". Instead he'll keep doing what he's doing and get reelected.

yes you are probably right, but maybe it will spur the Democrats into running someone who can talk this and everything else he stands for/runs on and gets attention brought to his re-election.

Bunch of extremely tall guys didn't tip him off?


Funniest part is he is doubling down online about it.

My wife is visiting her mom/step dad in Texas right now. Her stepdad believes QANON is run by Obama to make republicans look bad. They're also convinced shit is hitting the fan after this election with Biden declaring marshall law and refusing to give up power. So they've bought some comms system and are stockpiling.

And calling people who call him out on it, "komrade"

I can understand not liking Biden because of inflation.
I can understand not liking Biden because one is socially conservative (abortion, LGBTQ, etc.)
I can understand thinking that he's too old.

But I cannot understand thinking that Biden is some sort of dangerous marshall-law-declaring wanna-be dictator. The two things he's most famous for are being super bipartisan and liking ice cream.

OK, first of all, "martial law".

Second declaring martial law so that you can be a dictator is exactly what someone who wanted all the ice cream would do.

So it makes logical sense.

Well, at least more logical sense than most everything else found in MAGA-land.

It is actually Marshall's Law. The country is ruled by a discount clothing store.

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To be fair to him, they do have people born in South Korea, Serbia, Canada, and Croatia and no one on the team is actually from Michigan. The team does intend to occupy Little Caesars Arena and/or subjugate the other teams that will be at the arena for the entire weekend. If they succeed they will be moving on to do the same at State Farm Stadium back in Arizona (obviously to resupply through the comrade caravans at the border) so in a literal sense of the word I can sorta, kinda see where he is coming from.

Don't blame me, I voted for TJ Maxx.

Ditto. I voted for Steinmart.

Pretty sure we've heard this all before. But if you can pull it off Joe, this will cement your legacy win-lose-or-draw.

Hope making this public is part of the grand plan and not an off-the-cuff thing which will bring premature & unnecessary pressure to the participants.

https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-...-24/index.html

This will be big. Hopefully Iran shows some restraint.


US preparing for significant Iran attack on US or Israeli assets in the region as soon as next week | CNN Politics

Very nice Joe.

A good $11.6B bet considering we need the Taiwanese foundries and the nowadays constant threat from Xi.

(Not sure about the investment in Intel though).

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/08/tsmc...a-plants-.html

Man can't wait until we get trump in office so we can lose all these jobs Biden is creating....

Arizona and Georgia are the states that seem to be the biggest benefactors of those jobs, and they are both likely to flip to Trump.

and these plants will be completed during Trumps term and he will 100% take credit for them

As the corrollary to "vote against infrastructure spending and then 100% take credit from bringing money to your district."

Why aren't people more excited about billions in handouts to a billion dollar foreign company for jobs thst won't be available for years?

I'm kind of skeptical as well. This could be the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin all over again.

Makes pretty good sense to me. This is a pretty good win to run on.

The article has a link to below including a graphic IO-02

https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/re...rt-ix/download

$153 billion in student loans cancelled now so far. I didn't think I was eligible, applied anyway over a year ago, and got my public service program forgiveness notification this week wiping out my last $45k, plus a $9k refund (hopefully showing up in my checking account soon).

I know not everybody agrees with all that (I'm not even sure I do, ar least to the broad extent this is happening), but, its amazing to me how many lives this is impacting and how its largely going under the radar. At least relative to the SCOTUS ruling shutting down that $10k universal forgiveness. Which was such a drop in the bucket - people are getting $150k+ forgiven, every day.

Congrats for winning the lottery!

One more reason not to vote for Biden.

The guy has no idea how to do anything else except run up the deficit.

grats man :)

Are you talking about debt or the deficit?

Biden has been far better than the previous three presidents in reducing the deficit (which is not the same as running a surplus or

It will be funny when Trump rails against student loan forgiveness and gets asked how many millions in loans he never paid back.

that is awesome....

I have a question that will see if an argument I make about this is correct.

What are you going to do with the extra income you now have?

You're right

The deficit should totally go towards more tax breaks for billionaires, stock buy backs, and maybe another aircraft carrier.

Screw the public defender and average citizen. Why throw them a bone.

The refund is ultimately going pay for my wedding this year. Otherwise, I was a bit over-extended on that (that wedding planning shit has a way of expanding past your initial expectations).

The extra income isn't a huge life-changer for me on a month-to-month basis, I was paid ahead on the loans, they were were locked in at a very low interest rate when I consolidated years ago, so I mostly just paid a little here and there to make sure the balance didn't increase, but it otherwise it made more sense to pay those slowly. So I may not be the right person to settle your argument. But most of the extra money will go towards my retirement accounts and paying down a HELOC balance (which may have the effect of me feeling a little more willing to spend on stuff like home improvements).

I started at $120k debt for college + law school in 2006 (way too much to take on, but, I was young and dumb and felt like I was at a dead end in life and my career, so I went for it.) Paid aggressively for a while, got about $20k in grants from my law school for doing public service along the way. I've had the last $45k for a few years now between paying only the interest, and the not paying at all during the COVID pause.

So I'm probably not the most sympathetic loan forgiveness recipient now in that they're not a huge life obstacle, but, I had a lot of lean years with this hovering over me, and my retirement investments were definitely delayed by years as I took that debt on.

I'm sorry, we were looking for hookers and blow

Narratively:

U.S. government deficits (and debts) didn't really exist before 1980 (at least not in the way we understand them) outside of emergency situations like WWII.

But Reagan needed a way to pay for tax cuts and military budgets and so he and Bush ran them up.

Clinton brought them back down, even to running a budget surplus. In those heady days of the late '90s there was even talk of the U.S. government going back to not having much in the way of debt.

Then Bush decided tax cuts and Medicare Part D were important, so he blew up the deficit again.

When Bush lost Congress the Democrats put a halt on as much as they could and the deficit shrunk again.

Then, thanks to the complete and utter lack of oversight of the financial sector under 8 years of the Bush Administration, 2008 happened, and deficits needed to be run to get the country out of a recession.

Despite this, Obama brought the deficit back down, cutting it by about 2/3rds.

Then Trump & tax cuts edged it back up. COVID blew it up, and now Biden has brought it back down to basically where it was in 2019.


If you care about debts and deficits, then Democratic Presidents are fiscally responsible and Republican ones are not. The facts are the facts.

Stimulate the economy, or other things.

My guess is that’s inflationary. I rather he put it into his retirement accounts.

Quite the false choice you got there.

We could just...not spend the money?

We could just make people pay their taxes too.

Pfizer’s Massive Tax Dodge

Thanks.

My brother in law is a financial genius. He was two steps below Jamie Dimon before he retired at the age of 48 to race cars. We have often discussed the student loan situation and he is in agreement with me that it would be an amazing stimulus to the economy since most people would use the extra money to go out to eat more, purchase a new vehicle, etc...so your wedding example backs that up somewhat.

I've never understood the push back to this. It makes sense that if you didn't have loans, you had a viable degree and job, that the income you'd earn some of it would be disposable and thus stimulate the economy.

My loans are paid, I don't have any. I'm blessed, I'm happy for anyone who is having them paid off. There is no bitterness or what about me...

The what about me stuff is just pathetic, there's always someone who feels shrifted (generally by their bad choices) and want to screw everyone else from betterment (hence MAGATs).

This is also why I shake my head about not having universal healthcare, wouldn't it then reduce weight on companies to not have to shell out for let's face it nine times out of ten pretty shitty insurance. Wouldn't universal health care allow them to then allow employees to maybe put that money into 401k or disposable income, sure you'll have higher taxes but you're covered. Companies could also then redirect money to other things. Insurance companies wouldn't go kaput, they'd have the largest customer in the US Gov'nt.

I just don't get. Too much fuck you I got mine, or if I can't have it no one can.

So would he be cool with giving every American citizen 55k? Think the of spending everyone would do!

It's simply because someone has to pay for that stuff.

If Peter is robbed to pay Paul then Peter isn't like to congratulate Paul on his newfound wealth.

Most student loans are predatory; most kids who get student loans have to do so because they're living hand to mouth or their parents are and they have no recourse but to get loans that exceed really the value of college.

So what are youre options? You take the loan if you want a real career. Some careers require masters degrees, guess what theres another loan. Now you have your degrees but you are competing in a job market, you have have transport, you have to have place to sleep, you have to have food and utilities.

People like you are the problem. I assume your thought is if you can't afford it don't do it, well with education you don't have that option. You can be a stupid unskilled laborer but you won't be able to live.

Oh and I think in Europe the majority of college education is free. It's publically funded because you know who wouldn't want their citizens to get good education so they can get good jobs so you know stimulate the economy and have a skilled workforce populace.

This whole bullshit persona of pull yourself up by your bootstraps is so you can be poor and stupid. The mindset that it is robbery if the public gets "free" education/public health (meaning taxes go towards it) is one of the nastiest tricks the rich have played on you.

Like I said, I don't really care. My loans are paid for my degrees(bachelor and masters). I got a nice house in a nice area (suburbs). Good public school for my kids. My company has an okay health insurance and I've got about 400k in my 401k (I took out a chunk to pay for said house but that's okay it's doubled in value). I don't make too many extravagent purchases; I live easy, I can buy the things I need when I want.

My daughter is just finishing up her masters. Her loans are paid. Her starting salary is just North of 93k. She'll be fine at 23. Not a lot of kids will be.

That too.

Another savings opportunity.

Israeli journalist Noam Amir: "The Americans spent nearly a billion dollars on interceptors tonight." https://t.co/RLwjDoRlQR

— Sina Toossi (@SinaToossi) April 14, 2024

Nothing really to add to this wonderful, beautiful quote.

But let's talk more about Biden's cognition.

The audio of it is absolutely brutal.

One thing I did notice is no one was cheering. It gave me hope that even his most fervent supporters are starting to be like, WTF is he even saying?

It's another rally of word salad and where, at one point, his brain locked up and he slurred some nonsensical shit.

Had to make the Ken Burns edit to stop the intrusive thoughts https://t.co/08UhGZbl9E pic.twitter.com/AgqukvhPgW

— Dad (@SchneeDad) April 15, 2024

REL disliked fighting uphill so much he did it on two consecutive days.

:lol: what a wonderful husband!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/n...ery-trial.html

The details of the Ukraine-Israel-Taiwan bills to be voted on this Saturday. No mention of border security, I have to believe there'll be something.

Here’s what aid the House would provide Israel, Ukraine | CNN Politics
For Ukraine.

For Israel.

For Taiwan & APAC



EDIT: Axios reported below on the border stuff. If true, I still don't get it. GOP leverage is now with getting something for the border. Proposing a separate bill that probably won't pass the Senate this year seems to be a losing proposition. And there is no guarantee Trump will win for a border bill in 2025.

The below Politico article is kinda weird. If Tiktok was not owned/controlled by the Chinese government, why would the Chinese diplomats come out and try stop this legislation?

Just a moment...
Oblivious hypocrisy. Plenty of western companies are treated differently in China.

And this is puzzling, apparently Tiktok knows nothing about this.

The Ukraine-Israel-Taiwan bills total up to $95B in aid.

Sounds like Norway could fund that all by themselves just from one quarter.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/18/worl...q1-profit.html

Not as puzzling when you think about it. I believe interaction between Bytedance and the Chinese government is separated from Tik Tok. Whether it is a Chinese government front or not, the best way to have Tik Tok be successful is to keep it as separate from the Chinese government as possible.

They're mostly owned by VC and private equity firms. Sequoia and Susquehanna own a large chunk of the company. The same people who own half of Silicon Valley. It's not a huge secret who's invested in ByteDance.

We can drop the facade over "fears of Chinese ownership". They're invested heavily in tons of American companies, including Twitter and Meta (who actively share data on users with the Chinese government). This is more about appeasing some Israeli lobbyists and giving a right-wing billionaire like Steve Mnuchin a growing company at a steep discount.

Congrats Mike for getting this far. Congrats Jeffries (and Joe) for supporting and whatever nod-nod-wink-wink you had to do with Mike.

After the bills pass, I really want MTG to start the vacate process. I assume the Dems will support Mike and the vacate motion will fail. But it'll be fun watching the dysfunction for another week or two (and a reminder to the voters).

HouseÂ*passesÂ*key procedural vote on foreign aid bills, setting up final vote Saturday | CNN Politics

Enjoy your Tiktok while you can. I predict it's going down.

Just a moment...

Watching Jeffries speech now. Let's get it done.

According to WaPo on the border bill. So, Joe gets what he wants, albeit delayed for 5 months, and doesn't have to concede any border stuff. Weird GOP 3D chess.



EDIT: done deal!

Joe & Jeffries, think your best shot for continued bi-partisanship is Mike. Gotta support him if there's a vacate motion.

Some behind the scenes stuff that happened for Mike to let the vote happen

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/21/polit...wan/index.html
And his personal rationale ...



I hope it portends some additional, non-MAGA, bipartisanship in the future.

This is a really positive research paper on the benefits of student loan cancellation. It found that people who received help were able to buy homes, cars, and other necessities in life. It allowed them much more financial freedom and mobility.

A First Look at Student Debt Cancellation - Jain Family Institute

If I was running for President, I'd probably be promoting the shit out of this to lure younger voters instead of chastising them.

Kari Lake has now officially (?) lost the 2022 Arizona Governor general election as the Supreme Court failed to hear her appeal. Congrats Governor Hobbs I guess?

Still waiting MTG.

What's taking so long. Let's get it over with.

The closure vote for the aid packages passed the Senate 80-19. A bunch of Republican converts from the last vote in February.

Biden WH banned almost all non-compete clauses.

I'm starting to think it matters who the president is.

That should raise middle income wages a lot… A LOT


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Can't wait for the inevitable trip to SCOTUS where the right-wingers explain how non-compete clauses were common in the 1600s therefore their exclusion would never have been contemplated by the Founding Fathers.

Doesn't even need to make it to SCOTUS. Lawsuit just filed in the Northern District of Texas which is a rubber stamp for whatever businesses want.

Ryan Challenges New Non-Compete Rule Issued by Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

It's the district below where everyone is filing in. I'd say Joe should nominate some judges to fix that, but he's still abiding by the tradition of blue slips so that's not changing till at minimum of 2028.

reuters.com

Long article.

TL : DR lots of vibes that Dems will support Mike if there is a vote.

MTG has to know with Trump's lukewarm support of Mike & the vibes from the Dems that her vacate motion will fail. She's the type of person that will push it regardless just to force people to pick sides on the record. Hope it happens, I want to see the outcome.

Just a moment...

I think the Dems are willing to save Johnson at this point because there has been a lot of open infighting amongst R's all of a sudden. Getting on Sunday talk shows/openly talking about the reality of working with some of them are on a daily basis.



johnson finally allowing the Ukraine package to go through was maybe a signal that he too is tired of working with some of the Far right members of his party because they are going to be the ones that cause them to lose both the House and Senate in November. i think especially if they lose, they will finally be ready to jettison the more extreme members and work with the Dems to get rid of/remove from Committee Chairmanship roles. People like Gaetz, MTG, even Comer and Jordan considering their almost no results from their Committees, and have they even started their own Jan 6 investigation yet?

Dems want a functional government, even if they aren't the ones running it. A fair amount of GOPers love to do whatever it takes to make the federal government not work, so they can point out how the federal government doesn't work.

Well, a fair number of them don't want a working federal government period. Easier to get away with other antics if you don't have one.

(With all the hubub about the movie, I decided to finally read Killers of the Flower Moon earlier this year. One angle that was brought up about the emergence of the FBI was that before its existence, there really wasn't any way to investigate/prosecute much of anything if the local authorities weren't interested -- or were the ones who were behind the crimes. You have a crooked local/state authority, there's nothing that can be done about it. Which of course is how a lot of areas were run. Some would probably like to get back to that.)

Another win for Biden.

Biden-Harris Administration Announces Final Rule Requiring Automatic Refunds of Airline Tickets and Ancillary Service Fees | US Department of Transportation

DOT issued a rule requiring airlines to provide automatic refunds (not travel credits) to passengers when flights are cancelled, significantly changed (by 3 hours domestic, 6 hours international, increase in number of connections, and a few other triggering events), or significantly delayed baggage.

Next, he needs to kill of Ticketmaster and StubHub....

If he can do that, he belongs on Mt. Rushmore.

So the government should be involved in telling venues how to sell their tickets?

Srsly?

Why not solve the problem and just have the government seize the venues and give all the tickets away free?

Monopolies are illegal. So they'd just be enforcing the existing law.

I'd also wager most of those venues are publicly financed. So maybe there should be some free tickets included for subsidizing their business model.

That's the spirit! Eat the rich!

It's not as though there's some other rational solution ... I mean, they're obviously selling oxygen.

It's not as though consumers could {gasp} simply choose not to partake.

Want to put an end to Ticketmaster? Stop buying tickets sold through them.
No government overreach required.

And if an insufficient number of people are willing to do that then is there really that much of issue?

They have a monopoly which is the issue. There is often nowhere else to buy tickets.

I don't think it's government overreach to enforce existing laws that those companies are breaking. If you disagree with those laws, I get it, but they're on the books.

This would be bad.

This Bill Would Give the Treasury Nearly Unlimited Power To Destroy Nonprofits

Just make ticket flees a constant, flat fee, not a stupid percentage of the face value, and people wouldn't revolt. Ticketmaster's fees are so ridiculous and they have such a monopoly that even the 'indie' alternatives are only motivated to be fractionally less shitty, trying to get their sips from the money river, rather than trying to disrupt the model.

Yes. Because Saudi money is propping them up.


https://variety.com/2020/music/news/live-nation-saudi-arabia-investment-fund-1234590638/

You joke about some regulation being akin to the American government taking them over, but the Saudi government is literally their third largest shareholder.

Personally, I'm not adversely impacted by the Tik Tok ban. But please don't mess with DJI, I want to get a Mini 4 sometime.

If there was some hidden Chinese malware or backdoor stuff, I'm sure someone is smart enough to find it. I'd be more worried about Teslas or TVs made in China.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-in...ly%20be%20over.

I wouldn't worry about malware or backdoor stuff. People have gone through their product for years and found nothing. The ban is at the behest of Skydio which just can't compete with DJI or Autel. Not sure what stage of capitalism this brings us to.

It'll be a huge blow to a lot of small/medium businesses that have invested in the drones. LiDar mapping, surveyors, etc.

They are already pushing to change this. The new FAA bill has language in it that repeals the DOT rule. It has bipartisan support.

Yes, finally. Some excitement next week!

Marjorie Taylor Greene to try to oust Speaker Johnson next week : NPR