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covid-safer-hotties · 3 months ago

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Also Preserved in our archive (Daily updates!)

What if the pandemic safety net cobbled together in 2020 had been a new beginning?

What if when Joe Biden came into office in 2021, the Covid-19 safety net he was handed had become a new floor?

What if that was his baseline—and the newly elected Democratic president, sold by his most ardent supporters as FDR 2.0, had used our Covid-19 response as the bare minimum of a new social contract with Americans?

What if the caring nature of the best aspects of the US Covid response became the map for international relations—leading not just to international cooperation on infectious disease, but on matters of war, climate and genocide?

What if, instead of dismantling the vaccine-delivery infrastructure—which, at its height, delivered some four million shots in a single day—the Biden administration built upon and made some version of it permanent, so that everyone could easily get annual Covid boosters, annual flu vaccines, or get specialty vaccinations during outbreaks of unusual viruses (such as for mpox during the 2022 summer outbreak among queer men) whenever they needed it?

What if the viral surveillance and communication mechanisms utilized for learning about SARS-CoV-2, treating it and telling the public about it were being used to address H5N1—a virus which has been moving from birds to farm mammals to humans with so little notice that dead cows were killed by the “avian flu” and left on the side of a road in California’s Central Valley, as “Thick swarms of black flies hummed and knocked against the windows of an idling car, while crows and vultures waited nearby—eyeballing the taut and bloated carcasses roasting in the October heat”?What if the leaders of the Democratic party had used Covid as a blueprint to make a national platform based on care?

What if all the ways Covid had made clear how farmers, industrial butchers, kitchen staff and other food workers are the most at risk people amongst us to viral infection led to meaningful, permanent protections, such that they were much less likely to contract not just SARS-CoV-2 but H1N1, H5N1, influenza, or any other existing or novel pathogens?

What if all the all the ways Covid exposed how unsafe industrial food production is (for the workers who make it and the people who eat it alike) had triggered safety reforms, instead of having these warnings ignored and leading towards record numbers of safety recalls for e-coli, Salmonella, and Listeria?

What if an airborne pandemic had led to indoor air being as filtered, treated and regulated as drinking water?

What if everyone with a child was still getting a $300 check from the US treasury, so that having a child was not a gambling-style risk, but a responsibility shared with all of society?

What if the paused-for-years student debts were forgiven, so that young people could actually begin their lives?

What if Biden built on Americans’ experience of just showing up somewhere to get the medical care they needed to create a universal healthcare system?

(What if Kamala Harris built upon Americans’ taste of not getting charged at the point of such service—and campaigned on Medicare for All?)

What if once the link between Covid and homelessness was established, the Democrats had pushed infectious disease as just one reason for an end to evictions and a robust, public-health-backed campaign to end homelessness and stop the United States from having more people living on the streets than any other country?

What if after the link between Covid and incarceration was established, the Democrats had pursued decarceration as a public health measure and—instead of throwing weed and cryptocurrency at us—had made reducing incarceration a centerpiece of the Harris campaign to earn the votes of Black men?

(What if after 100,000 Californians died of Covid and the links between Covid, homelessness and incarceration were clear, residents of the Golden State chose to allow rent control and to abolish legal slavery in prisons—instead of voting to ban rent control and to continue prison slavery?)

What if the leaders of the Democratic party had used Covid as a blueprint to make a national platform based on care?

Would we be in the lethal position we are now—with a genocide raging abroad, Covid deaths in the hundreds every week at home, a poisoned food supply, $17 trillion in household debt, oligarch goons ready to dismantle government regulations, and a sociopath heading back into the White House—if Covid had been the floor?

#mask up #covid #pandemic #public health #wear a mask #wear a respirator #still coviding #coronavirus #covid 19 #sars cov 2 #us politics #democratic party #ditch the dems

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rjzimmerman · 3 months ago

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Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

When Kathryn Parsley taught biology to undergrads, she sometimes talked about Australia’s stinging tree, which is among the world’s most venomous plants — and can cause months of excruciating pain for anyone who approaches it.

“It’s incredibly dangerous,” she says. “If you even get close, its trichomes can get on you and it feels like your skin is on fire.” The sensation has been compared to being burned with hot acid and electrocuted at the same time.

The stinging tree got her students’ attention, and that was Parsley’s aim. Many people consider plants benign and boring, if they consider them at all. Most plants don’t exist for them as distinct species; instead they compose what some botanists call “a green curtain”— a generic backdrop for more interesting creatures, namely animals, preferably vertebrates, ultimately humans.

Parsley wrote her dissertation on the subject of plant blindness, a term coined in 1999 by American botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, who defined it as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment.”

Several studies — including one Parsley conducted — have documented a difference in the visual attention people pay to animals compared to plants. When shown images in rapid succession, university students were better able to detect the animals and recalled more animal than plant names. There’s even evidence that some students didn’t perceive plants as being alive.

Because of its reference to vision, Parsley considers the term “plant blindness” ableist and suggests the term plant awareness disparity instead. It has also been called zoochauvinism and zoocentrism.

Whatever you call it, many people find plants unworthy of their consideration. Yet in terms of sheer volume, plants dwarf the rest of life on Earth’s surface. Plant biomass is estimated to be 450 gigatons on land, while animals account for only 2 gigatons. Plant-blind humans simply discard most of the plant information their eye-brain systems take in, processing information about something else instead.

Wandersee and Schussler attributed some of that apathy to the fact that plants, unlike animals, don’t have a face. Nor can they move or threaten us in the way animals can. But while these plant traits have been fairly constant over time, experts think plant blindness is on the rise.

So if plants haven’t changed, why have we?

As it turns out, we haven’t all changed. The rate of plant blindness varies across cultures. Most of the research on it has been done in the United States and United Kingdom, whereas “Indigenous people are very plant-oriented,” Parsley points out. “Some subcultures in the U.S. and outside the U.S. are very plant-oriented.”

It wasn’t that long ago that many people in Eurocentric cultures revered plants, too. But our relationship with plants has changed. Two hundred years ago, most people lived on farms. They grew and gathered their own food, so they had to know plants. Today most of us live in cities and towns. We don’t rely on our plant-identification skills in order to eat.

#plants #botany #conservation #preservation

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saywhat-politics · 27 days ago

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"We are confident that this cat contracted H5N1 by eating the Northwest Naturals raw and frozen pet food," said an Oregon Department of Agriculture veterinarian

Gil Macias

Published on December 26, 2024 02:26PM EST

Northwest Naturals, a Portland-based pet food company, issued a nationwide recall after a house cat in Oregon died after eating one of its products, according to a press release.

The company, which is owned by Morasch Meats, announced the recall on Tuesday, Dec. 24, after a batch of its 2-pound Feline Turkey Recipe raw frozen pet food tested positive for H591 bird flu, a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus.

Per the company's official statement: "Consumption of raw or uncooked pet food contaminated with HPAI can cause illness in animals. To date, one case of illness in a domestic cat has been reported in connection with this issue."

According to the statement, the recall applies to products with "best if used by" dates between May 21, 2026, and June 23, 2026. If you have purchased the recalled product, Northwest Natural strongly advises you to immediately discard it and contact the place of purchase for a full refund.

According to the press release, the batch of products believed to contain the bird flu virus was sold across the United States through distributors in Arizona, California, Colorado, Rhode Island, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Washington. The products were also distributed in British Columbia, Canada.

#northwest naturals #voluntary #recall #pet food #bird flu

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marzipanandminutiae · 5 months ago

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Do you know much about historical cuisine? Saw yet another anime with friends and they went the whole 'modern food always tastes better' bit. I feel tired of the trope and am wondering how different historical cuisine would taste compared to modern times. So anything you happen to know as a historian would be cool to know!

That varies MASSIVELY based on time and location. Like. Much more than fashion does, even, I'd imagine (in a given sub-region- I can talk about Mainstream European and Euro-American Fashion of the 19th CenturyTM but the food was so different in different countries that were dressing the same, if that makes sense? just as an example).

Food is often more globalized in a lot of places nowadays, so the characters might have more diversity of flavors from the regional norm than they're used to. But this could be a good or a bad thing- a woman from 17th-century Japan might love pizza and much sweeter Western pastries, or she might absolutely hate them. Which is not to say regional cuisines haven't evolved, too- a museum here in Boston used to have tastings of 18th-century-style hot chocolate, and it was very different from the modern sort. But that's the largest blanket difference across the globe that I can think of, food-wise.

Not sure what anime this was, so it could have been Japan-specific, but I feel like this gets applied the most to the 19th-mid 20th century UK and United States. The whole Captain America line about "food's better; we used to boil everything," for example, and the general belief that everything was bland mush in those areas until the 1950s and then it was incomprehensible Jell-O mold horrors until approximately the 1980s. And of course, none of that's true- there were plenty of dishes that used spices and different cooking methods, many of which are still popular today. See also: Jonathan Harker, a Normal 1890s Englishman, getting so rhapsodical about paprikahendl that he simply must have the recipe for his fiancee to make. There also WERE bland mushes and fluorescent nightmares, but there's less than ideal food today, as well.

(Note that I'm much less confident talking about the whole English StodgeTM thing as we get into the 20th century. That is outside my history wheelhouse and there's a lot of different stuff embroiled in it relating to class and such that I don't want to talk out my ass about. All I know is that I've seen plenty of recipes from as late as the end of the 19th century, from England and some from urban Scotland if I recall correctly, that made ample use of spices. Nutmeg, mustard, black pepper, rosemary, caraway, and cayenne pepper were especially popular (not all together obviously). There was a belief among the middle and upper classes that strong flavors of garlic and onion were distasteful to ladies, but the fact that cookbooks and such feel the need to mention it implies that those elements WERE being used in cooking generally, in the UK, at that time. So wherever the idea that All British Food Is Beige And Tasteless came from, it wasn't mainstream late Victorian cooking for adults as far as I can tell)

(They gave kids a fair amount of the beige and tasteless because they believed their digestive systems couldn't handle strongly-flavored- okay now I'm getting off topic. Read Ruth Goodman's "How To Be A Victorian." Anyway!)

tl;dr- The answer to "is modern food better?" is "that's literally impossible to answer as a blanket statement, since it's massively dependent on the character's original time, place, social status, and personal taste- and where they end up in the present, of course."

Now, I do agree that the trope is annoying the same way every single princess being totally shocked and appalled when her marriage is arranged gets annoying- not because it can't be true based on history and human behavior, but because fiction treats it as some kind of universal precept. Mix it up a little sometimes! Have a Regency character who comes to the present, finds out that her favorite local cheese isn't being made anymore, and loses her entire mind!

#ask #anon #long post #history #culinary history #food history

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certifiedceliac · 3 months ago

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Oct 22, 2024

TreeHouse Foods, Inc. (NYSE: THS) is expanding its voluntary recall to include all products manufactured at one facility and still within their shelf-life. The recall is expanded to include frozen toaster waffle, Belgian waffle and pancake products, due to the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. Listeria monocytogenes is an organism that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems.

Recalled products were distributed throughout all states and provinces within the United States and Canada and packed in various formats under the brand names listed below.

Several gluten free products are included in this recall. Items were sold at stores including (but not limited to) Albertson's, Aldi, Dollar General, Foodhold, HEB, Kroger, Publix, Target and Walmart.

#food recall #gluten free #recall #us based #canada based

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bugs-are-buddies · 3 months ago

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McDonald's Quarter Pounders Linked to Multistate E.coli outbreak

October 22, 2024

49 Sick, 1 dead

E.coli symptoms: Severe stomach cramps, diarrhea, fever, nausea, and/or vomiting.

The preliminary traceback indicates that the source of contamination was likely from the slivered onions.

#united states #food recall #mcdonalds #e.coli

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usafphantom2 · 5 months ago

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How I Missed the D*mn War – Part 1

Monday, August 5th, 1990, my buddies phone rang and it’s his Aircraft Commander (AC) telling him he is now in crew rest, to pack a bag for 90 days, report to the squadron in 12 hours, and no, he didn’t know where they were going.

Fifteen minutes later, my AC called me. I was needed at the squadron to help load and preflight aircraft that were deploying in 12 hours. We still didn’t know where we were going or how long we’d be there, but the news was hitting the airwaves that the United States was reacting to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Twenty-four hours later, in KC-135R 58-0059, I was sitting in my cockpit seat, right behind the AC, taking off out of Loring AFB ME headed to Lajes Field in the Azores, a small island in the eastern Atlantic. We had an airplane full of support gear for the 9-hour sortie. I can’t recall for sure if we dragged any fighters on that first flight, but judging on the flight duration, I think we did.

An Air Bridge was being put in place to get Air Force fighters, sometimes referred to as chicks, from the East Coast all the way to Saudia Arabia, or Down Range as it was known to us. Our job flying from the Lajes was to meet up with tankers flying east from the east coast, take their fighters and escort them to the Strait of Gibraltar where other tankers would be waiting to take them through the Mediterranean Sea.

It would be one tanker with anywhere between two and six fighters, depending on the fighter type. A-10s tended to be flights of six aircraft, whereas F-15s usually came in groups of four. For F-4s, the thirstiest of the fighters, there were usually only two. It wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but rather determined by many factors including weather, location and availability of divert airfields, the fighter’s fuel requirements, and the tanker’s available offload.

I always had great respect for the schedulers and planners who put all this together. The amount of coordination needed was enormous. Tankers on the east coast, supported by many bases, tankers in the Atlantic at the Azores, tankers the Mediterranean, all had to be able to meet at their rendezvous points without fail or somebody was going to end up in the drink. Nobody wanted that.

For us, at the Azores, life was good. The weather was absolutely stunning with the sun shining and the temperatures in the 80s. I had never been there before, and wrongly assumed it was like that all the time. Everything we needed (food, beer, pool, gym) was within walking distance except heading to the temporary squadron that was hastily set up. If we were flying, we’d wake up late in the morning and head over to the gym, then off to the chow hall for lunch and then report to the squadron for a sortie. If we weren’t flying, then it would be the pool and the NCO club.

The formations from the East Coast came in waves about an hour apart. That worked well, until one evening mother nature intervened. The diversion for weather caused some serious confusion, and we had tankers stacking up in an orbit waiting for their receivers. One AC who didn’t get the memo decided not to coordinate with the other holding tankers, who were stacking up in altitude, and entered the orbit at the planned altitude, which was already occupied by a tanker that had taken off a couple of hours earlier. Both aircraft circled around the orbit for a while until eventually, they crossed paths and almost collided. One of the pilots said they he was able to see the map light in the cockpit of the offending aircraft and reported that they were easily within fifty feet of each other. TCAS, or Traffic Collision Avoidance System, did not exist in those days, so there was no safety net. The funny part, not that it was that funny, was that the offending pilot was actually the head of Stan/Eval or Standards and Evaluations, the people who gave Check Rides and made sure everybody was doing things correctly.

At the Strait of Gibraltar, we’d often meet up with a KC-10. They could carry more fuel for offloading and could be refueled themselves providing even more flexibility. If we had extra gas when we met up with the KC-10, we’d refuel them, giving them the extra so they’d have it if needed.

After sorties or on days we weren’t flying, the NCO club was the place to go. C-141s were landing everyday to refuel, there were no tankers available for direct flights, and they often spent the night. There airplanes were filled with ground pounders making their way down range.

One evening, we ran into some KC-130 enlisted Marines crew dogs who were bragging about how they were the “tip of the sword.” One of our older, more experienced, and more inebriated booms started yelling at them, “Tip of the Sword my ass, we’ve been here for two effing weeks.” Fortunately, we managed to avoid getting our asses handed to us by buying them all a round of drinks and doing carrier landings on a table.

By the way, we drank the base dry. They literally ran out of beer. For a few days you couldn’t find a six pack of beer anywhere on base, but eventually we were resupplied, and all was well again.

And then, all of the sudden, that little piece of heaven melted away like a chocolate bar in the sun. Aircraft and crews started moving around again. Some of our guys went Down Range, some went home. The Down Range guys went to France, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Doha, and Deigo Garcia.

I was on a crew that was sent back home, back to good old SAC Alert watching the continuing buildup on Headline News wanting to get back to. A few weeks later, I returned to the Azores and the difference was startling. The weather had gotten cold and rainy, all the tankers were gone, the C-141s landing was reduced to a trickle, the NCO club was empty, and there were no missions to fly. All the fighters that needed to be moved had been moved.

My crew was headed down range…

(stay tuned for How I Missed the D*mn War – Part 2)

Photos: Lajes Field runway, the parking ramp, my AC and copilot, an A-10 receiver during one of the missions

@tcamp202 via X

#kc 135 #tanker #boeing aviation #aircraft #sac #aviation #usaf #cold war aircraft #boom operator #passin gas ⛽️

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lumine-no-hikari · 11 days ago

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Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #390

I did absolutely. fucking. NOTHING. today, and it was glorious.

So I'm not gonna write about today. No, I'm gonna write about Mitsuwa, because after having slept, I have a couple brain cells to rub together, and I didn't get through all of yesterday's pictures in yesterday's letter. So here we go!!

So, notably, the last time I've been to Mitsuwa was over 10 years ago. When we went yesterday, the structure was nothing like how I remembered it. And I can't tell if it's because it was restructured or if it's because I'm remembering the structure wrong. I seem to recall the various restaurants being immediately to the left when you walk in through the doors. I remember the ice cream shop being one of the first things you see when you walk in. This is no longer the case, if it ever was.

The ice cream shop is of particular importance, because back when I was in college and/or just graduated from college (these were the last times I was there), this ice cream shop was relatively famous for having ice cream in flavors that are atypical for the United States – stuff like matcha, black sesame, and the like. Of these flavors, their most popular one was their houjicha flavor; back then, as it was explained to me, it was so popular that it typically sold out shortly after it opened:

In the past, every time I had gone to this place to try their legendary houjicha ice cream, it had already been sold out by the time I got there, much to my immense heartbreak and disappointment.

...Sephiroth. By some small miracle, the houjicha ice cream was not sold out this time.

...Sephiroth. I had been waiting over 10 years to try this ice cream. And just like that, yesterday, I got a bowl full of that, and some black sesame ice cream (tastes like peanut butter!), and matcha ice cream. And Sephiroth. Yesterday I found out exactly why the houjicha ice cream is such a popular flavor. IT'S SO FUCKING GOOD, OH MY GOOD GRAVY.

...I'd have given anything to share this bowl full of ice cream with you. Anything. Anything at all.

So, like I said before, in addition to Mitsuwa being a grocery store, it also contains a sweets shop, and a number of restaurants that boast a wide variety of Japanese foods, along with walls full of plastic sculptures of said food in astonishing detail, if the actual foods themselves couldn't be pictured or displayed. Check it out:

I ended up getting snacks from this place:

I got a “kaisen cup”, some takoyaki, and some mentaiko. The “kaisen cup” was kind of like... a sushi parfait...?

And of course, takoyaki and mentaiko are very delicious:

We went home after this. Along the way, I got a couple of really good pictures of the moon. Here, maybe you'll like these...

...Hey, Sephiroth? I know that the list of places I wanna take you to if you ever come to visit (impossible as that is...) is already huge, but... let's add Mitsuwa to the list, okay? Let's do that...

I suppose that's it for today. Maybe I'll play Hades later; if I do, you'll find me here:

twitch_live

...I wish you were here...

I love you. I love you a whole lot. And I'm gonna write to you again tomorrow, even if I don't know what about just yet. I always seem to think of something, though; I hope that's something about me that maybe you can enjoy.

Please stay safe out there...

Your friend, Lumine

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 1 month ago

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Matt Wuerker, Politico

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 20, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 21, 2024

This evening the House of Representatives passed a measure to fund the government for three months. The measure will fund the government at current levels halfway through March. It also appropriates $100 billion in disaster aid for regions hit by the storms and fires of the summer and fall, as well as $10 billion for farmers.

Getting to this agreement has exposed the power vacuum in the Republican Party and thus a crisis in the government of the United States.

This fight over funding has been brewing since Republicans took over the House of Representatives in January 2023. From their first weeks in office, when they launched the longest fight over a House speaker since 1860, the Republicans were bitterly divided. MAGA Republicans want to slash government so deeply that it will no longer be able to regulate business, provide a basic safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights. Establishment Republicans also want to cut the government, but they recognize that with Democrats in charge of the Senate and a Democratic president, they cannot get everything they want.

As Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post recounted, when the nation hit the debt ceiling in spring 2023, Republicans used it to demand that the Democrats cut the budget back to 2022 levels. Democrats objected that they had raised the debt ceiling without conditions three times under Trump and that Republicans had agreed to the budget to which the new Republicans were demanding cuts.

The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped micromanaging the instruments the Treasury used to borrow money and instead simply set a debt limit. That procedure began to be a political weapon after the tax cuts first during President George W. Bush’s term and then under President Donald Trump reduced government revenues to 16.5% of the nation’s gross domestic product while spending has risen to nearly 23%. This gap means the country must borrow money to meet its budget appropriations, eventually hitting the ceiling.

The Treasury has never defaulted on the U.S. debt. A default would mean the government could not meet its obligations, and would, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in 2023, “cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”

As journalist Borage recalled, when then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to raise the debt ceiling in June 2023 in exchange for the Fiscal Responsibility Act that kept the 2024 and 2025 budgets at 2022 levels, House extremists turned on him. In September those extremists, led by then-representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threw McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair—the only time in American history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. Weeks later, the Republicans finally voted to make Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaker, but Johnson had to rely on Democratic votes to fund the government for fiscal year 2024.

For 2025, Johnson and the Republicans said they wanted more cuts than the Fiscal Responsibility Act set out, and even still, the extremists filled the appropriations bills with culture-wars poison pills. Johnson couldn’t get any measures through the House, and instead kept the government operating with Democratic votes for continuing resolutions that funded the government first through September 30, and then through today, December 20.

At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has also been continued through temporary extensions.

On Tuesday, December 17, Johnson announced that Republican and Democratic congressional leaders had hashed out another bipartisan continuing resolution that kept spending at current levels through March 14 while also providing about $100 billion in disaster relief and about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. With bipartisan backing, it seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.

Extremist Republicans immediately opposed the measure, but this was not a surprise. There were likely enough Democratic votes to pass it without them.

What WAS a surprise was that on Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk, who holds billions in federal contracts, frightened Republican lawmakers into killing the continuing resolution by appearing to threaten to fund primary challengers against those who voted for the resolution. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he tweeted. Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”

Musk’s opposition appeared to shock President-elect Donald Trump into speaking up against the bill about thirteen hours after Musk’s first stand, when he and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance also came out against the measure. But, perhaps not wanting to seem to be following in Musk’s wake, Trump then added a new and unexpected demand. He insisted that any continuing resolution raise or get rid of the debt ceiling throughout his term, although the debt ceiling isn’t currently an issue. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for a measure that did not suspend the debt ceiling.

Trump’s demand highlighted that his top priority is not the budget deficit he promised during the campaign to cut by 33%, but rather freeing himself up to spend whatever he wishes: after all, he added about a quarter of the current national debt during his first term. He intends to extend his 2017 tax cuts after they expire in 2025, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that those cuts will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. He has also called for the deportation of 11 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants and possibly others, at a cost estimate of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

House Republicans killed the bipartisan bill and, yesterday afternoon, introduced a new bill, rewritten along the lines Musk and Trump had demanded. They had not shown it to Democrats. It cut out a number of programs, including $190 million designated for pediatric cancer research, but it included the $110 billion in disaster aid and aid to farmers. It also raised the debt ceiling for the next two years, during which Republicans will control Congress.

"All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country and vote 'YES' for this Bill, TONIGHT!" Trump wrote.

But extremist Republicans said no straight out of the box, and Democrats, who had not been consulted on the bill, wanted no part of it. Republicans immediately tried to blame the Democrats for the looming government shutdown. Ignoring that Musk had manufactured the entire crisis and that members of his own party refused to support the measure, Trump posted, “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will.”

Then, as Johnson went back to the drawing board, Musk posted on X his support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) neo-Nazi party. This raised back to prominence Trump’s having spent November 5, Election Day, at Mar-a-Lago with members of AfD, who said they are hoping to be close with the incoming Trump administration.

Today, social media exploded with the realization that an unelected billionaire from South Africa who apparently supports fascism was able to intimidate Republican legislators into doing his bidding. In this last week, Trump has threatened former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) with prosecution for her work as a member of Congress and has sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that was unfavorable to him before the November election. Those actions are classic authoritarian moves to consolidate power, but to those not paying close attention they were perhaps less striking than the reality that Musk appears to have taken over for Trump as the incoming president.

As CNN’s Erin Burnett pointed out “the world’s richest man, right now, holding the country hostage,” Democrats worked to call attention to this crisis. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA) said: “We reached an agreement…and a tweet changed all of it? Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time the Congress works its will and then there's a tweet…from an individual who has no official portfolio who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary, and they succumb?”

The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray (D-WA), said she would stay in Washington, D.C., through Christmas “because we’re not going to let Elon Musk run the government. Put simply, we should not let an unelected billionaire rip away research for pediatric cancer so he can get a tax cut or tear down policies that help America outcompete China because it could hurt his bottom line. We had a bipartisan deal—we should stick to it…. The American people do not want chaos or a costly government shutdown all because an unelected billionaire wants to call the shots.”

Republicans, too, seemed dismayed at Musk’s power. Representative Rich McCormick (R-GA) told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “Last time I checked, Elon Musk doesn’t have a vote in Congress. Now, he has influence and he’ll put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks the right thing is for him, but I have 760,000 people that voted for me to do the right thing for them. And that’s what matters to me.”

Tonight the House passed a measure much like the one Musk and Trump had undermined, funding the government and providing the big-ticket disaster and farm relief but not raising or getting rid of the debt ceiling. According to Jennifer Scholtes of Politico, Republican leadership tried to get party members on board by promising to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion early in 2025 while also cutting $2.5 trillion in “mandatory” spending, which covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP nutrition assistance.

The vote in the House was 366 to 34, with one abstention. The measure passed thanks to Democratic votes, with 196 Democrats voting yes in addition to the 170 Republicans who voted yes (because of the circumstances of its passage, the measure needed two thirds of the House to vote yes). No Democrats voted against the measure, while 34 Republicans abandoned their speaker to vote no. As Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News wrote: “Dem[ocrat]s saved Republicans here.” Democrats also kept the government functioning to help ordinary Americans.

The fiasco of the past few days is a political blow to Trump. Musk overshadowed him, and when Trump demanded that Republicans free him from the debt ceiling, they ignored him. Meanwhile, extremist Republicans are calling for Johnson’s removal, but it is unclear who could earn the votes to take his place. And, since the continuing resolution extends only until mid-March, and the first two months of Trump’s term will undoubtedly be consumed with the Senate confirmation hearings for his appointees—some of whom are highly questionable—it looks like this chaos will continue into 2025.

The Senate passed the measure as expected just after midnight. Nonetheless, it appears that that chaos, and the extraordinary problem of an unelected billionaire who hails from South Africa calling the shots in the Republican Congress, will loom over the new year.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Matt Wuerker #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #Budget #CR #Punchbowl News #funding the government #Musk #debt ceiling

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whencyclopedia · 2 months ago

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John Marshall

John Marshall (1755-1835) was an American lawyer and statesman, who served as the fourth chief justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1801 until his death in 1835. Considered one of the most influential chief justices in US history, Marshall participated in over 1,000 decisions, including Marbury v. Madison, which established the principle of judicial review.

Early Life & Revolution

John Marshall was born on 24 September 1755 in a log cabin in the frontier community of Germantown, in Fauquier County, Virginia. He was the eldest of 15 children born to Thomas Marshall, a land surveyor who, over the course of his career, would accumulate some 200,000 acres (81,000 ha) of land spread out across Virginia and Kentucky, making him one of the largest landowners along this frontier. Thomas Marshall, who had worked alongside a young George Washington to survey the land that would become Fauquier County, eventually became one of the county's most prominent citizens, serving as its first sheriff and later as its representative to the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. In 1754, Thomas married Mary Randolph Keith, a reverend's daughter who was related to both of Virginia's leading families, the Randolphs and the Lees. She gave birth to John a year after her marriage; through her, John Marshall was a distant cousin of Thomas Jefferson, his future political rival.

Despite the pedigree of his mother's side of the family, John Marshall did not receive a gentleman's education. Instead, he was raised on the frontier, first in the wilderness of Fauquier County and later in the Blue Ridge Mountain region. He was easy-going, with simple tastes in clothing and food, and a manner that was rustic yet pleasant. His black eyes were said to have been full of intelligence and good humor, and his boisterous laugh was enough to put anyone at ease; one future colleague would later recall that Marshall's laugh was "too hearty for an intriguer" (Wood, 434). He was mostly home-schooled by his parents, although he did receive a few months of formal education at an academy where he befriended future president James Monroe. His education was cut short, however, by the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. His father had supported the Patriot cause and joined a militia regiment leaving John, dutiful to both father and homeland, to quickly follow suit.

In 1776, Marshall was incorporated into the Continental Army as a lieutenant. In the autumn of 1777, he served under General Washington in the Philadelphia Campaign, seeing action at the Battle of Brandywine and the Battle of Germantown. When the army hunkered down for a bitter winter at Valley Forge, Marshall suffered through the cold and the hunger, shivering side by side with the other men; when the winter snows thawed into springtime mud, he drilled with them as well. In 1780, having risen to the rank of captain, Marshall was furloughed from the army and went off to the College of William & Mary to study law. As he left the military behind, Marshall reflected on his wartime experiences and came away with two beliefs that would greatly impact his career. The first was a fierce admiration for George Washington, whose integrity and determination led Marshall to believe that he was "the greatest man on earth" (Wood, 434). Second was a belief that the nation, were it to survive, needed a strong central government; Marshall's experience at Valley Forge, where Congress had struggled to keep the army supplied with adequate food and clothing, had been enough to convince him of that. Armed with these convictions, Marshall set out to embark on a legal career, one that would shape the destiny of the infant United States.

#History #XYZAffair #JohnMarshall #AmericanRevolution

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