“I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you.”
To boldly go … where? To the bank for a cashier’s check, it seems. Hold the phasers, drop the shields, piss on the dilithium crystals and call in the Tribbles.
Beam me up, Scotty — there’s no intelligent life down here.
On the first day of July, the month named for Julius Caesar, the Senate bent to its dictator’s will and approved his giant, ugly-ass, abortion of a bill.
Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina— who will not seek re-election after Orange Julius Caesar threatened to find someone to primary him — were the only Repugs to vote nay. All others assumed that fabled position.
Prince MAGAbelly had to cast the deciding vote, and now this huge, loathsome turd must float back to the House for resolution of the changes made in its version. A vote there could come as early as tomorrow.
Might there be a few hurdles involved? Hear ye, hear ye, from Ye Oulde New Yorke Times!
The changes senators made to a version of the bill the House passed in May have raised the cost of the package while also teeing up deeper cuts that would lead to more Americans losing health insurance coverage. That alienated both poles of the party — fiscal hawks concerned about soaring deficits and mainstream Republicans wary of shredding the social safety net — complicating its path in the Senate and threatening its prospects in the House.
It would add at least $3.3 trillion to the already-bulging national debt over a decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Sunday — a cost that far exceeds the $2.4 trillion price of the version passed in the House. And it would result in $1.1 trillion in health care cuts, nearly $1 trillion of them to Medicaid, causing 11.8 million more Americans to become uninsured by 2034, the same office found.
Hurdles, you say? It is the hee, and also haw. The majority in the House makes the Senate look … well, senatorial by comparison. The Senate is up to its saggy tits in senile old hoors, to be sure, but the House is the political equivalent of a Bizarro World Alice’s Restaurant, where you can get anything you want, including Alice, her husband, Ray, Fasha the dog, the entire complement of the Group W bench, and maybe Officer Obie too, all rolling around in a half-ton of garbage, if that’s what blows your skirt up.
So poor people will starve, get sick, and die, rich people will get richer and write letters to their senators complaining about how they have to step over the stiffs on their way to the squash court, and Elon Spunk will start a new political party in a frantic attempt to … save us from ourselves? Nope. To put himself back in the news cycle as anything other than a bad joke, despised even by the people who bought his cars.
Better debug that exploding Starship stat, bruh. I hear OJC wants to claw back your subsidies and deport you to Mars, and for sure he’ll make you drive your own paddy wagon.
The roving Eye of Mordor has fallen upon Sandia National Labs. And where the Eye goes, the Sword shall follow.
The deets remain elusive. But the gist of it is that Sandia plans “to reduce its workforce” by as many as 510 employees as part of a “restructuring effort aimed at cost reduction,” which may include a “voluntary separation program” and a hiring freeze.
This is PR-speak for “budget cuts, buyouts, and layoffs.”
One to three percent of the staff is not a huge bloodletting, unless you happen to be one of the 510 and have a couple kids in university, a parent in a nursing home, and the usual credit-card debt and home/auto/college loans outstanding.
Nevertheless, you may well ask, how is it that the Military-Industrial Complex is reduced to counting its pennies in these dark days?
Well, it seems as though the Military portion of the Complex is in tip-top shape. No shortage of comfy chairs, caviar, and Champagne in the Boom-Boom Room.
But the Industrial aspect? Well … it suffers from elevated levels of solar, wind, and geothermal technologies that don’t kill foreigners, DEI, or The Woke, and thus are not covered by MAGA Cross-Red Shield. So those have to come off, stat. And with a scimitar, not a scalpel.
Anesthesia, you ask? Ho, ho. Suck it up, Buttercup. Drugs are for Closers. And you posie-sniffing Poindexters wonder why you weren’t invited to the King’s Birthday Parade. You should’ve grabbed a chair in the Boom-Boom Room before the music stopped.
We had just found a small patch of shade at the No Kings rally when Herself showed me the first reports of the assassinations in Minnesota.
Another psycho with a gun.
The first one I can remember was John F. Kennedy. I was nine. Next was Malcolm X. Then Martin Luther King. Bobby Kennedy. Fred Hampton. Harvey Milk. John Lennon. The list goes on.
Tell you what. This sort of thing does not make you feel good about being in a strange place surrounded by people you don’t know, with a DJ working one side of the park and some sort of drum circle going in the other.
Herself caught me looking around and wondered why.
“I’m trying to make sure I know how we can get the hell out of here,” I said.
She thought I meant at the end of the festivities. I was thinking about the beginning of someone’s fantasies.
A young woman came up with a tray of sliced bananas and oranges and asked if I’d like something.
“No, I’m good,” I replied. “But thanks just the same.” Head still on a swivel.
Paranoia strikes deep Into your life it will creep It starts when you’re always afraid Step out of line, the men come and take you away
I tried to cling to the spirit of the moment — small-d democrats old and young and in between, with imaginative signs and fashion choices, dancing, music — Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand,” because of course “Stand” — but it slipped away from me. It was a large park, but a cramped space, with a lot of noise and people milling around and a sound system that was not up to the task.
We about half heard Rep. Melanie Stansbury from the drum circle, then changed locations to see if we could find a better listening post. Nope.
I tapped Herself on the shoulder and gave her the old thumb over the shoulder.
“Ready to beat it? ” I asked. She was. We did.
I’m glad we went. I’d do it again tomorrow. I’ll do it as long as I can still take some hope from it.
Because it beats the mortal shit out of killing people.
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