• 10 Posts
  • 584 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 7th, 2024

help-circle


  • Remember the last shutdown, when we had the Republicans over a barrel and almost every Democrat in the nation was like, “Finally! This is the line and we’re not backing down!” - and then Schumer backed down in return for a measly promise that Democratic issues would be ‘considered’ [completely ignored] the next month?

    He’s 75, he thinks the government still works like it used to (and actually still works, lol), and we desperately need a change of leadership away from the Schumer’s and the Pelosi’s.


  • This is like 30 years ago, before electric cars were really a thing. Some friends and I were hanging out in the Pine Barrens one night. It was an area we knew pretty well, and we’d walked down this long sandy road with no turnoffs to get to where we happened to be hanging out.

    Suddenly, all of nature around us went silent - and I mean all of it. Sound carries at night, especially with the lakes to echo off of. We looked up the road we were walking back along, and there was a pair of headlights coming our way. We could tell they were headlights because they were lower than a person would carry a flashlight, they were moving in that peculiar synchronization that headlights have, and they’d do several quick bounces when they hit a rut in the road.

    So anyway, we’re in this road in the ass-end of the Barrens, everything’s turned absolutely deadly silent, and there’s this car coming down the road toward us. And the three of us suddenly realize that it’s absolutely silent. Not only is nature silent, but the car isn’t making any noise either.

    We watch the headlights of this car headed down the road toward us - it’s a couple hundred yards away now, the Pine Barrens are still dead silent, and the car isn’t making any noise either.

    My nerve broke first. I bolted off the road and partially vaulted over a couple shrubs, my friends close behind me. We turned around, and the car was still coming toward us - and then suddenly the headlights went out. We waited, but nothing happened - no car headlights, no interior lights, no car doors opening, no voices - nothing. We waited, and still nothing.

    We dithered and talked over what to do and we eventually grabbed a couple branches and headed back up the road. We reached the area where the headlights turned off - and there was no car. We turned our flashlight on the (very) sandy road, and we could see our tracks heading down, but there weren’t any recent car tracks. We checked the road and the verge all the way back to our car, and - nothing. The forest went dead silent, there were headlights, the car didn’t make a sound, and then it just … disappeared. We went back the next day, and there still was no sign of anyone on that road that night except us.

    .

    There’s also a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading into New Jersey. Like two miles before the rest stop, there’s a sign saying something like “New Jersey - 25 miles”. We pull into the rest stop, get some gas, relieve ourselves, grab a snack, get back on the road. Go maybe two or three more miles, and there’s another sign saying “New Jersey - 5 miles”. Like, wtf? If there a space warp at that rest stop or something?



  • No. ICE was already plenty funded from last summer’s bill, which is why they’re still on the streets and in the airports. The Democrats were (supposedly) fighting for restrictions on ICE: no masks, warrants required, limits on use of force, etc. Once again, they got absolutely none of the things that they were supposedly fighting for.

    The Republicans, however, get to claim they’ve “ended” the shutdown, and have also gotten pretty much everything they wanted.







  • Malone claimed on social media that [HHS] had disbanded [the vaccine advisory board] and planned to completely reconstitute it. But soon after, Malone retracted his claim, saying it was a miscommunication and that disbanding ACIP was merely one of the “options being considered.” [A] HHS spokesperson […] then released a statement to media pointing to Malone’s retraction and adding, “Unless officially announced by us, any assertions about what we are doing next is baseless speculation.” Malone [said] that Nixon’s response was what led to his departure. “After Andrew trashing me with the press, I am done with the CDC and ACIP,” Malone said in a text message Tuesday morning. “That was the last straw.”

    Sounds like he thought he could say anything and that it would magically happen, and he didn’t like being called out on his bullshit.

    “Suffice to say I do not like drama, and have better things to do,” he added. […] “Hundreds of hours of uncompensated labor, incredible hate from many quarters, hostile press, internal bickering, weaponized leaking, sabotage—I have better things to do,” he said.

    I’m delighted that he should go off and pursue these “better things”, lol.