US Politics January 2019: we are #ready to drop something much, much bigger

During Trump's shut down, E-Verify is down.

Checking employment eligibility of potential hires was by far the most effective means of deterring undocumented immigration, but some knob wants steel slats that will face a decade of environmental lawsuits and never be built, and threw the gates wide open.

they chant "build the wall" because it lends their whiteness a further prestige.

Fox & Friends Apologizes for Accidental Graphic Saying Ruth Bader Ginsburg is Dead https://t.co/mR2CxtLbKJ pic.twitter.com/mVZFSbbygQ

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) January 21, 2019

“This was a technical error that emanated from the graphics team.”

We accidentally made a graphic.

why can’t someone “accidentally” run over Steve Doocey with a forklift

Why can't someone 'accidentally' permanently disable Fox News's ability to broadcast?

very sinister

i don't understand how something like that could happen

obit stuff is often made ahead of time, nothing malicious, just being prepared. so this is just a problem with an entry in a database somewhere.

“This was a technical error that emanated from the graphics team.”

i.e. Technically, it's an error. She's not dead yet.

good mourning!

day 31 of the shutdown.

I’m sure I’m not the only one here who’s tried to child-lock a parent from Fox News.

it looks to me like the shitbag's Saturday afternoon "offer" was all McConnell trying to maneuver things back to a conventional give-and-take negotiation, which of course legitimates shutting down the government as a legislative negotiating tactic. He can't possibly expect that this offer will go anywhere in the House though, much less peel off the necessary amount of GOP Senators, nor does he have any leverage to get Trump to offer more/compromise more, so I don't see this going anywhere productive.

(my apologies if we already covered this over the weekend - Sat at 3pm is a stupid time to announce anything!)

once upon a time, two political parties unanimously agreed on a budget in the senate and sent it to the president for his signature

but ann coulter and rush limbaugh got mad. it didn't seem racist enough

so trump added a giant symbolic wall of racism to the mix and everyone went home for a month

but it didn't seem racist enough

so trump decided to treat human lives like a bargaining chip with fluctuating value, and offered 3 years of their lives to the deal

But he was still hungry.

lol

I sense a new trend in "the pulse-of-America" puffpieces

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-voters-now-blame-him-for-the-government-shutdown/2019/01/20/416051de-1b55-11e9-9ebf-c5fed1b7a081_story.html?utm_term=.2e0252866ebd

i know people have problems w/ this analogy, but this extended shutdown/meltdown really is the point where we're effectively "negotiating" or dealing w/ a man with the mentality of a toddler (without the capacity for affection) and we're suffering from there being noone to be able to lock him in his room for a few hours.

Ken Janicki, a 66-year-old retired technology worker who voted for Trump, sipped on his coffee the other day and put it in blunt terms.

“I am all for border security, a full wall around this country,” he said. “You come in legally, I’ll welcome you to be my neighbor. But you come in illegally and I’ll introduce you to my friend Smith and my other friend Wesson.”

America!

And when he visits Paris he flips a table when none of the restaurant staff understands his English

xpost I also think even the average American increasingly views him as dishonest, or at the very least an unreliable negotiating partner, so they know where the Democrats are coming from.

we're suffering from there being no one to be able to lock him in his room for a few hours.

Constitutionally speaking, the Republicans in the Congress could end this at any time, by passing a budget, sending it to Trump to be vetoed, then overriding the veto. They pretend they are unable to act, but it is entirely their choice.

they know that if they betray the President they will all get primaried

Which makes them fully complicit in the shutdown. <- my point

Right

10% absence at TSA yesterday and these numbers are creeping up https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases

Trump seems like the type who'd be a big believer in the sunk cost fallacy.

confession: I don’t gaf about the TSA

controversial opinion!

passengers standing in line for more than an hour tend to gaf about that. their anger is going to be directed somewhere, but chances are good it won't be directed at the working stiffs who aren't getting their paychecks.

I gotta stay, the smoothness with which MIA and goddamn LaGuardia ran this morning stunned me. At 7 a.m. I waited in no line and the airport was deserted (it was also nine degrees outside and on a holiday weekend but still!)

A full wall around this country and its many islands and x-claves.

no trump voters will get incensed over illegal immigration into Guam or American Samoa.

Going through security at Newark and SFO this week was super painless. I kinda figured that TSA workers were dropping a lot of the security theater aspects of their job.

they're doing a press release like this every day now

WASHINGTON – Nationwide, the Transportation Security Administration screened 1.78 million passengers yesterday, Sunday, Jan. 20. Overall, 99.9 percent of passengers waited less than 30 minutes and 93.1 percent of passengers waited less than 15 minutes. In TSA Pre✓® lanes, passengers on average waited less than 5 minutes. Please refer to the table below for top airport specific wait times.

Yesterday’s complete figures show that TSA experienced a national rate of 10 percent of unscheduled absences compared to a 3.1 percent rate one year ago on the same weekday, Sunday, Jan. 21, 2018; many employees are reporting that they are not able to report to work due to financial limitations.

https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/012019.jpg

i'm not sure if those maximum times are like the 95th percentile or something. they seem very low if not. in any case they're trending up but not "leave an extra hour early and still worry if you're going to make it", which i guess is where it will start to matter politically.

xp I learned recently that SFO uses a private company, Covenant Aviation Security,(which contracts with TSA) for passenger/baggage security

I have never made an effort to leave particularly early for a flight and not been stuck sitting around an airport for hours.

Although I live on a good no-traffic day about 12 minutes from the airport, I'm a get-there-at-least-three-hours-early guy. I remain scarred by the TSA lines the first couple years after 9-11.

Probably for another thread/poll.

When the Patriots win the super bowl again what will it be a metaphor for

racism

gaming the societal refs

Next: The CIA honors Salvador Allende. https://t.co/mLWMstZWly

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) January 21, 2019

Kiss, of all bands, is offering free meals to TSA workers at their chain of restaurants. Smart promotion from these hucksters? Yep. But one meal a day (salad or pulled pork sandwich) until TSA gets paid is still pretty generous.

Seems pretty damn calibrated to me. A lot of them have families to feed, too. And why just TSA workers? Why not every furloughed federal worker?

I think Coast Guard, too. I assume they'll feed you if you take your boat through the drive-thru.

Because the TSA are the only branch of the federal government that republicans think they use.

Eh, it's pretty clear that TSA is at the fore of lots of people minds. That's why no one is writing stories about national park workers calling in sick or whatever. Anyway, there is lots of nutso stuff in here:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/even-if-he-did-do-it-it-wouldnt-be-a-crime-rudy-giuliani-donald-trump-robert-mueller-moscow-buzzfeed/amp

omg, Rudy gets himself tangled up so easily:

I can tell you, from the moment I read the story, I knew the story was false.

Because?

Because I have been through all the tapes, I have been through all the texts, I have been through all the e-mails, and I knew none existed. And then, basically, when the special counsel said that, just in case there are any others I might not know about, they probably went through others and found the same thing.

Wait, what tapes have you gone through?

I shouldn’t have said tapes. They alleged there were texts and e-mails that corroborated that Cohen was saying the President told him to lie. There were no texts, there were no e-mails, and the President never told him to lie.

So, there were no tapes you listened to, though?

No tapes. Well, I have listened to tapes, but none of them concern this.

and putin definitely doesn't have any tapes either. there are no tapes. no one has been listening to tapes much recently, and uh both sides do it!