In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it will have taken to get him a new handgun.
Unsurprisingly, our elected representatives are part of the problem:
As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Jaysis. Planes that can’t fly. $13 billion sitting ducks. Millions for retrofitting Vietnam-era helicopters to carry and launch drones. For Ike’s fabled Military-Industrial Complex it’s like robbing the same bank, over and over and over again, because you have a guy on the inside. You don’t even need to bring that pistol you can’t seem to acquire for some mysterious reason.
“When I said ‘I’ll take it black,’ I didn’t mean this black. …”
Cost of coffee? Up nearly 21 percent. Cost of screws from Taiwan, America’s No. 1 supplier?
Just ask the Taiwanese, who make screws for everything from bathroom cabinets to data-center fans.
Margins are thin and getting thinner, as is the herd of manufacturers, thanks to The Pestilence’s 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, plus competition from mainland China on product and the homegrown computer-chip industry for workers and government support.
Kent Chen of Sheh Fung Screws Company told The New York Times that his orders are down 20 percent compared to this time last year.
“Everything is in pause mode. A lot of our customers said, ‘We’ll see,’ but then we didn’t receive many orders.”
Oh, he got his orders, all right. Same as the rest of us.
“Assume the position!”
We are so screwed. Ain’t enough coffee in the world for this bullshit. Especially at these prices.
Disney CEO Vernon “Dean” Wormer pulls the plug on Jimmy Kimmel.
The Dean came for Jimmy Kimmel’s “Animal House” yesterday.
Nobody should be surprised, especially Kimmel, who has been attending the Hollywood School of Hard Knocks for the better part of quite some time and been sacked and/or compelled to apologize more than once over a long and checkered career.
Kimmel got his start in radio while still in high school, but didn’t land on America’s TV screens until 1977, when he provided the comic relief on “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” which aired on Comedy Central. “The Man Show” followed two years later.
And then in 2003 he got to hang out his own late-night shingle, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC.
Maybe he felt safe there. Comedy Central would fall under the pinstriped shadow of Paramount, which earlier this year punked CBS News and Stephen Colbert to get its merger with Skydance approved.
But this year, ABC — a lesser rub-and-tug parlor in the Disney chain of cut-rate whorehouses — found itself caught between two rocks and a very hard place.
Two big owners of TV stations — Nexstar and Sinclair, the first seeking FCC approval to buy a rival, the second a right-wing white-noise machine — said they would suspend “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after he addressed the killing of the recently canonized — or is that “cannonized?” — Charlie Kirk. Disney’s empty suits took notice and then gave same to Kimmel, reportedly as his audience was filing in for yesterday’s show.
If Kimmel didn’t see it coming, Calvin Coolidge certainly did. In an address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on January 17, 1925, the president said: “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.”
Some of them are, for sure. And you’re only funny until you get in their way.
“HQ says there’s a woke art exhibit at the Smithsonian. Cover me … I’m going in.”
“Tin soldiers and dipshits coming.”
Thus spake Charles P. Pierce about the governors of Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia sending National Guardspersons to “help police” the crime-ridden hellhole that is* Washington, D.C., which escalates the performative bullshit to DUMBCON 3.
Charlie further notes that Philip Bump, late of The Bezos Post, has assembled an interactive map “illustrating all the places in Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina that are actually more crime-ridden than Washington,” yet somehow muddle along with nothing heavier than the local coppers.
Parody throws its arthritic paws in the air and says, “Chieu hoi! I give.”
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.
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