Month: November 2023

And can you blame them?

TPM reports:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is experiencing some political repercussions for dumping gasoline on his fractured party’s descent into dysfunction when he ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for the sin of keeping the government open. While the congressman is still popular in his Panhandle home district, his standing in Florida overall is in a state of disrepair.

The Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab released the results of statewide polling it conducted between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11 last week. It found that 57 percent of Florida voters are unhappy with Gaetz’s job as a congressman. That means that just 21 percent of voters surveyed approved of the congressman’s performance in Washington. About eight percent were “neutral” and 14 percent indicated they didn’t know how they felt, per the poll results.

When broken down by party, his approval rating is only a little less bleak. Among Democrats surveyed, almost 83 percent said they disapprove of the professional antagonist. But among Republicans, 36.3 percent disapprove of the congressman, with just 36.6 percent approving of his “work.” That’s less than the percentage of Republicans who responded to the same survey saying they approved of the decision to remove McCarthy as speaker — 42 percent. The Florida Atlantic University poll surveyed just under 1,000 Florida voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2%.

While Gaetz’s popularity in his home district is holding steady, his statewide disapproval follows news that the Republican may be interested in running for governor in 2026 when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is term-limited out of the governor’s mansion. NBC News reported in September that the congressman was “100 percent in” on a potential 2026 bid. Gaetz has denied that reporting, offering only that his sole “political focus right now is Trump 2024.

I won’t be surprised if he becomes Governor at some point, to tell you the truth. Florida has an incredibly record of electing creeps like Gaetz.

If you don’t watch Fox, as you shouldn’t, you miss the incisive reporting and analysis they provide.

Hurt: No, they do want to take away the gas stoves and, in fact, they are taking away the gas stoves… because they hate us. They hate joyfulness. They hate pies. pic.twitter.com/iaCigmRh2W

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 25, 2023

Yes, the radical left commies, Marxist thugs like you and I hate pies. We really do. Especially apple pie which is, as you know, American. Because we hate America and don’t want it to be great again.

(Nobody wants to “take away” anyone’s gas stoves. The idea is that in the future new gas stoves will not come online and instead modern technology will be delivering a superior form of gas stove that isn’t going to kill the planet. Because we hate everyone.)

In case you are wondering what this is about, Kamala Harris and her husband Doug posted a picture of themselves on Thanksgiving with a pie in their kitchen, (at the Naval Observatory where they live? I don’t know.) This has turned into a viral sensation among the right wingers because it shows that they have a gas stove which makes them monstrous hypocrites who hate everyone and want t=people to suffer without any pies.

This is what we’re dealing with. Snotty, stupid. nasty little mean girls spouting nonsense. Tens of millions of people think this is awesome.

BTW: Just as a reminder, you are not allowed to call right wingers “deplorable” because it’s rude and disrespectful of them and their culture.

In all senses of the word

Via Axios:

Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) said Friday he won’t resign from Congress but acknowledged he will likely be expelled as he lobbed salacious accusations at colleagues and called the chair of the Ethics Committee a “p***y”.

A growing number of lawmakers in both parties who previously voted against expelling Santos have flipped and now say they will vote to remove him following an explosive Ethics Committee report.

Santos said he knows he is “going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” adding: “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”

 In an X space hosted by journalist Monica Matthews, Santos said he is “not going to resign” because “[if] I resign, I admit everything that’s on that report.”

Santos said he will defend himself “to the end of time,” criticizing the Ethics Committee probe as biased and goading Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) to “stop being a p***y” and force a vote on his expulsion resolution.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) joined the space and urged Santos to make a “direct apology” to voters and resign because “we’re going to vote to expel you George.”

The Ethics Committee’s 56-page report said the panel’s bipartisan investigation found a “complex web of unlawful activity involving Representative Santos’ campaign, personal, and business finances.”

[…]

Santos threw out wild allegations against unnamed colleagues in an effort to cast his alleged extraordinary wrongdoing as the norm.

Santos said Congress is “felons galore” and filled with “people with all sorts of shiesty backgrounds.”

He called his colleagues “a bunch of hypocrites,” accusing them of extramarital affairs, getting drunk with lobbyists and then missing votes due to hangovers, and handing out voting cards like “candy” to allow others to vote on their behalf.

Despite his ongoing legal troubles and likely expulsion, Santos said he is not ruling out another run for office and said he plans to stay involved in politics in some capacity.

“I definitely will not be going away … elected office is not off the table,” he said, though he added that he won’t run any time soon and he likely will never run for office again in New York.

Lol. Why not run for president? Apparently, you can do whatever you want if you’re a candidate and the law can’t stop you.

Seriously, I wouldn’t put it past this guy.

Looks like it…

Ed Kilgore on the latest:

Until recently, Democrats’ biggest concern about the 2024 youth vote was that millennial and Gen-Z voters were so disappointed with our octogenarian president that they might not turn out in great enough numbers to reelect Joe Biden. Young voters were, after all, the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the Democratic base in the last election. But now public-opinion surveys are beginning to unveil a far more terrifying possibility: Donald Trump could carry the youth vote next year. And even if that threat is exaggerated or reversible, it’s increasingly clear that “the kids” may be swing voters, not unenthusiastic Democratic base voters who can be frightened into turning out by the prospect of Trump’s return.

NBC News reports it’s a polling trend that cannot be ignored or dismissed:

The latest national NBC News poll finds President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among young voters ages 18 to 34 — with Trump getting support from 46% of these young voters and Biden getting 42%. …

CNN’s recent national poll had Trump ahead of Biden by 1 point among voters ages 18 to 34.

Quinnipiac University had Biden ahead by 9 points in that subgroup.

The national Fox News poll had Biden up 7 points among that age group.

And the recent New York Times/Siena College battleground state polling had Biden ahead by just 1 point among voters ages 18 to 34.

According to Pew’s validated voters analysis (which is a lot more precise than exit polls), Biden won under-30 voters by a 59 percent to 35 percent margin in 2020. Biden actually won the next age cohort, voters 30 to 49 years old, by a 55 percent to 43 percent margin. In 2016, Pew reports, Hillary Clinton won under-30 voters by a 58 percent to 28 percent margin, and voters 30 to 44 by 51 percent to 40 percent.

So one baby-boomer Democrat and one silent-generation Democrat kicked Trump’s butt among younger voters, despite the fact that both of them had their butts kicked among younger primary voters by Bernie Sanders. It’s these sort of numbers that led to a lot of optimistic talk about younger-generation voters finally building the durable Democratic majority that had eluded the party for so many years.

Then what’s gone wrong?

For one thing, it’s important to note that yesterday’s younger voters aren’t today’s, as Nate Silver reminds us:

Fully a third of voters in the age 18-29 bracket in the 2020 election (everyone aged 26 or older) will have aged out of it by 2024, as will two-thirds of the age 18-to-29 voters from the 2016 election and all of them from 2012. So if you’re inclined to think something like “gee, did all those young voters who backed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2012 really turn on Biden now?”, stop doing that. Those voters are now in the 30-to-41 age bracket instead.

But even within relatively recent groups of young voters, there are plenty of micro- and macro-level explanations available for changing allegiances. Young voters share the national unhappiness with the performance of the economy; many are particularly afflicted by high basic-living costs and higher interest rates that make buying a home or even a car unusually difficult. Some of them are angry at Biden for his inability (mostly thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court) to cancel student-loan debts. And most notoriously, young voters are least likely to share Biden’s strong identification with Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas (a new NBC poll shows 70 percent of 18-to-34-year-old voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war).

More generally, intergenerational trust issues are inevitably reflected in perceptions of the president who is turning 81 this week, as youth-vote expert John Della Volpe recently explained:

Today many young people see wars, problems and mistakes originating from the older generations in top positions of power and trickling down to harm those most vulnerable and least equipped to protect themselves. This is the fabric that connects so many young people today, regardless of ideology. This new generation of empowered voters is therefore asking across a host of issues: If not now, then when is the time for a new approach?

All of these factors help explain why younger voters have soured on Uncle Joe and might be open to independent or minor-party candidates (e.g., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, or a possible No Labels candidate). But they don’t cast as much light on why these same voters might ultimately cast a ballot for Donald Trump.

Trump is less than four years younger than Biden and is about as un-hip an oldster as one can imagine. He’s responsible for the destruction of federal abortion rights, a deeply unpopular development among youth voters (post-election surveys in 2022 showed abortion was the No. 1 issue among under-30 voters; 72 percent of them favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases). His reputation for racism, sexism, and xenophobia ought to make him anathema to voters for whom the slogan “Make America Great Again” doesn’t have much personal resonance. And indeed, young voters have some serious issues with the 45th president, even beyond the subject of abortion. In the recent New York Times–Siena battleground state poll that showed Trump and Biden about even among under-30 voters, fully 64 percent of these same voters opposed “making it harder for migrants at the southern border to seek asylum in the United States,” a signature Trump position if ever there was one.

But at the same time, under-30 voters in the Times-Siena survey said they trusted Trump more on the Israel-Hamas conflict than Biden by a robust 49 percent to 39 percent margin. The 45th president, needless to say, has never shown any sympathy for the Palestinian plight. And despite the ups and downs in his personal relationship to Bibi Netanyahu, he was as close an ally to Israel’s Likud Party as you could imagine (among other things, Trump reversed a long-standing U.S. position treating Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank as a violation of international law and also moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a gesture of great contempt toward Palestinian statehood). His major policy response to the present war has been to propose a revival of the Muslim travel ban the courts prevented him from implementing during his first term.

But perceptions often differ sharply from reality. Sixty-two percent of 18-to-29-year-old and 61 percent of 40-to-44-year-old voters said they trusted Trump more than Biden on the economy in the Times-Siena survey. It’s unclear whether these voters have the sort of hazy positive memories of the economy under Trump that older cohorts seem to be experiencing or if they instead simply find the status quo intolerable.

In any event, the estrangement of young voters provides the most urgent evidence of all that Team Biden and its party need to remind voters aggressively about Trump’s full-spectrum unfitness for another term in the White House. Aside from his deeply reactionary position on abortion and other cultural issues, and his savage attitude toward immigrants, Trump’s economic-policy history shows him prioritizing tax cuts for higher earners and exhibiting hostility to student-loan-debt relief (which he has called “very unfair to the millions and millions of people who paid their debt through hard work and diligence”). Smoking out the 45th president on what “Trumponomics” might mean for young and nonwhite Americans should become at least as central to the Biden reelection strategy as improving the reputation of “Bidenomics.” And without question, Democrats who may be divided on the Israel-Hamas war should stop fighting each other long enough to make it clear that Republicans (including Trump) would lead cheers for the permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank while agitating for war with Iran.

There’s no world in which Donald Trump should be the preferred presidential candidate of young voters. But it will require some serious work by Team Biden not only to turn these voters against the embodiment of their worst nightmares but to get them involved in the effort to keep him away from the power he would abuse.

To me, the single most persuasive way to convince these folks that Trump is not only not the answer but is the greatest threat to everything they hold dear is to show him in his own words. Everything they care about from the Palestinians to climate change to abortion to gun violence to racism and immigration and LGBTQ rights are at monumental risk if he is elected in 2024.

Many of them are too young to know much about him. Consider that some college freshmen were just 14 or 15 when he was in office. Some of the older ones weren’t paying attention. (Even a lot of full adults don’t seem to recall what he was like.)

They need to be reminded of “drink bleach” and “shithole countries” and “grab ’em by the pussy” and “shoot the protesters” and “windmills cause cancer” and “there has to be a punishment for the woman [if she has an abortion], on and on and on. That’s not even to mention the fact that he tried to steal the election and staged a coup. This all happened! If they knew, I believe that most of them would not want to vote for him.

Of course, the lure of the protest vote is always there and that, in my view, is the bigger problem. I have found throughout my life that trying to convince a young person that nobody gives a shit about their protest vote, certainly not the right wing asshole they help elect with it, and it never seems to penetrate. I just don’t know how to convince them that it does no good and that there is no moral superiority in enabling the worst of all choices.

It’s not just the younger people. The whole country needs to be reminded of what happened to us when this monster was in charge. It was a nightmare. And it will be a thousand times worse if he wins again. I can’t believe I live in a country where that’s even possible. It’s not as if most of us are not old enough to remember it.

It’s unbearable to even think about.

Thank you Philip Bump for this perfectly illustrated explanation of the question of life expectancy which I have tried to explain to people to no avail. For some reason this concept seems to be hard for some people to accept:

One day recently, three old friends met to play pickleball. Alan, 85, had taken up the sport first. Over time, he compelled his old college acquaintances Bob, 80, and Don, 75, to join him, in keeping with the rapidly growing sport’s slow downward trend in the median age of its participants.

On this day, though, Bob was preoccupied.

“Does it ever bother you guys,” he asked, as they were warming up, “that each of us is above the average life expectancy in the U.S.?” Bob, you see, was well-versed in government data, in part thanks to his willingness to indulge in the natural human inclination to want to understand and explore numbers.

And Bob was right. The most recent estimates compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for the year 2021, put American life expectancy at just over 76 years of age. That varies by race, with Asian Americans being estimated to live more than 83 years and Black Americans just under 71 years.

“I think about this a lot!” interjected Don. “Especially since men have even shorter life expectancies, regardless of age.” Don was not known as being particularly attentive to such intricacies, surprising his companions. But he’d spent an enormous amount of time over the prior 12 months considering the subject, as he believed that it was important for his plans.

And, again, this was correct. White men, like Don, had a life expectancy of just over 73 years in 2021. Among Black men, like Alan, the expectancy was under 67 years.

“You’re lucky,” replied Bob, who’d grown increasingly agitated. “You live in Florida, where life expectancies were slightly higher than the national figure in 2020. I live in Delaware, where life expectancies are even lower.” (If you are curious why Don and Bob were playing pickleball with Alan despite living in different states, it is because each of them had ready access to private aircraft for different reasons.)

“Well, that’s true,” Alan replied, joining the conversation at a useful pivot point. “But that’s because expectancy correlates to income, which correlates to race.”

“But regardless, you guys are completely missing the point,” he continued, now getting warmed up. (He was used to having to get Bob and Don to have to understand the bigger picture.) “What you’re talking about is life expectancy at birth, which isn’t what is important for us.”

Bob and Don looked at each other in confusion. Alan sighed.

“Think of it this way,” Alan continued. “Imagine there’s a houseplant that consistently lives for precisely 10 years. But there’s one exception: for the first year after it sprouts, 1 in 5 plants will suddenly die for inexplicable reasons.”

“So this plant lives an average of a bit over 8 years,” he said. “let’s just call that the life expectancy for the sake of the example. Once you’re past that first year, though? All of the plants will live to 10 years.”

“So a three-year-old plant has a life expectancy of 10 years?” Bob asked.

“No,” Alan replied. It has a life expectancy of seven years — seven more years.” Bob and Don looked at each other and nodded.

“That’s how the government publishes life expectancy data,” Alan said. “Americans born in 2021 were expected to live 76.1 years. But Americans who were 75 were expected to live 11.5 more years — to 86.5. And since people keep living past their life expectancies, the expectancy keeps going up over time.”

“What do you mean?” Don asked.

“Well, think of it this way,” Alan said. “A lot of people who were 75 in 2021 will live past 11 more years, past the age of 86. We need to recalculate life expectancies for those people — and it obviously has to be higher than 86!”

Alan grabbed his phone and pulled up the CDC data. No one objected; data is more interesting than pickleball.

“As ages increase, so do life expectancies,” Alan said, showing them a graph he found in a newsletter he subscribes to. “And, over time, the racial disparities in life expectancy mostly fade. Expectancies converge.”

The graph, well-designed and clear, made this obvious. For example, Black Americans have died younger than other groups for decades. Once Black Americans live to old age, though, their life expectancies match other groups.

“In fact,” Alan said, zooming in on the graph, “by the age of 85, Black Americans have higher life expectancies than Whites, even just among men. But its subtle.”

For Bob, though, something else about the graph leaped out at him.

“Wait,” he said, pointing at the chart. “This suggests that, according to 2021 estimates, I’d be expected to live nearly another eight years after I turned 80.”

“That’s right,” Alan replied. “And that’s with those 2021 estimates, reflecting the height of the pandemic. It’s expected that the new estimates will show life expectancies moving back up after multiple years of declines.”

“Oh, that’s a relief,” Bob said. “I’d been thinking about making a long-term, four-year commitment next year but was wondering whether that made sense, given that I’d be 86 when it ends. I guess I should have more confidence in my ability to fulfill that commitment than I assumed.”

Alan nodded. Bob looked relieved. Don, though, seemed irritated for some reason. And so ends our allegory.

Seems a better use of our energies

“You don’t get a lot of chances to correct history’s mistakes. You get a few. And when you get them, you damn sure better take advantage of them,” said environmental historian Dan Flores. He wasn’t talking about consigning the MAGA movement to the ash heap of history. He was talking about efforts to restore bison herds on the Great Plains:

In 1805, when the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the border of what is now North Dakota and Montana, they found herds of American buffalo so numerous, “the whole face of the country was covered” by them, Meriwether Lewis wrote. Less than a century later, in 1889, the nation’s most majestic animal (whose scientific name is Bison bison) had been reduced from practically uncountable numbers to an easily countable 541, and the species teetered on the edge of extinction.

Today their numbers stand at about 350,000, most raised as livestock.

Only 20,000 of them are protected in federal and state preserves in what are called conservation herds. Meanwhile, some ranchers and nonprofit environmental organizations are trying to provide buffalo with something closer to the habitats they once knew: more room to roam and native grasses to eat. Under those conditions, the bison can reclaim their former role as the “keystone” species of the prairies, improving conditions for all other species to thrive.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, herself a Native American, has a $25 million initiative to “combine bison restoration with grassland restoration, making large swaths of the prairies healthier and helping them store more carbon to combat climate change.”

The Pentagon loses far more each year in its couch cushions.

For Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa from North Dakota, the buffalo is “a symbol of our existence and the symbol of our difficulties,” but it can become a symbol of so much more. “When you look at a buffalo, you don’t just see a big shaggy beast standing there,” he said. “You see life. You see existence. You see hope. You see prayer. And you see the future for your young, the future for those not yet born. And if we give the buffalo a chance, like I think we should, it will strengthen us not only as human beings but as Americans.”

This new chapter in our nation’s complicated and sometimes tortured history is poised to move beyond the restoration of a shaggy but majestic animal. If given a chance, the buffalo can lead us toward a long delayed reconciliation with the first people who inhabited the bounteous land we all now call home — and into a future every American can be proud of.

Just don’t be the type of American idiot who puts a juvenile bison into a van or a juvenile fascist into the White House.

Some are gospel, others mere suggestions

It helps that the Second Amendment has a powerful manufacturing lobby behind it. It helps that the press, churches, and the ACLU stand behind the First. Case after case has reached the U.S. Supreme Court about those. The problem, of course, is that other, better-funded conservative advocacy groups exist to make application of the Constitution’s provisions as selective as possible as Frank Wilhoit so adroitly observed, if only by implication.

Poor little 14th Amendment. It’s long as amendments go (the longest). Maybe that’s why its application has been so contested and/or ignored. Too long to read? Or perhaps too radical to enforce.

Sherrilyn Ifill writes in the Washington Post:

I use the word “radical” deliberately. The 14th Amendment was conceived of and pushed by the “Radical Republicans” in Congress after the Civil War. They were so named because of their commitment to eradicating slavery and its vestiges from American political life. A number had been abolitionists, and all had seen the threat that white supremacist ideology and the spirit of insurrection posed to the survival of the United States as a republic. Although the South had been soundly defeated on the battlefield, the belief among most Southerners that insurrection was a worthy and noble cause, and that Black people — even if no longer enslaved — were meant to be subjugated to the demands of Whites, was still firmly held.

The 14th Amendment was meant to protect Black people against that belief, and the nation against insurrection, which was understood to constitute an ongoing threat to the future of our country. Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist who rose to become one of the most prominent voices of the Reconstruction period, had no illusions about the persistence of the “malignant spirit” of the “traitors.” He predicted that it would be passed “from sire to son.” It “will not die out in a year,” he foretold, “it will not die out in an age.”

Depends on your definition of age.

States of the former Confederacy and others saw fit not to apply Section 1 for nearly 100 years after its passage. And the Supreme Court let them, Ifill wants us to remember. It’s still contested nearly 60 years after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Section 1
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 3 is even more an orphan. No lobbying groups, powerful or otherwise, to fight for it. And that provision in Section 2 about reducing states’ representation for disenfranchising its citizens? It may as well not be there.

Section 3
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Ifill reflects on the reluctance of courts to enforce the 14th Amerndment even now in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, and after a Colorado judge found that Donald J. Trump incited an insurrection, BUT:

The 14th Amendment is treated as a suggestion but rarely imposed in full measure when the status quo will be upended. This was perhaps most famously on display in 1955, in the case of Brown II, when the Supreme Court undercut its majestic decision of a year earlier in Brown v. Board of Education,by hedging on the immediate end to segregated schools and counseling instead that local officials should move with “all deliberate speed.”

The Colorado court’s approach to Section 3 continues this tradition. To find that a president incited a violent insurrection against the United States but hold that such a president can still run for public office — indeed to return to the presidency itself — could not stand in starker opposition to the words and spirit of Section 3.

The 14th Amendment has once again proved too bold for the judges empowered to interpret it. Political forces are at play again, this time fearful of a backlash if Trump is removed from the ballot. As this case makes its way through the appellate process and, most likely, to the Supreme Court, it should be understood in the context of how the timidity and unwillingness of judges to acquiesce to the judgment of the 14th Amendment’s framers effectively derailed our democracy’s promise after Reconstruction and until the mid-20th century. We must ensure that it does not do the same in the 21st.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Americans are better at spouting phrases from their founding and governing documents than they are at living by them.

Remember when conservatives accused liberals of moral relativism? Yeah.

“White” Rhino baby!

The Virginia Zoo is thrilled to announce the birth of a female southern white rhinoceros on November 9, 2023 at 5:40 a.m., bringing their crash up to five. The calf is the second rhinoceros ever born at the Virginia Zoo and the second offspring to 17-year-old father Sibindi and 10-year-old mother Zina, who birthed the Zoo’s first rhino calf, Mosi, in 2021.

Zina and Sibindi are a recommended breeding pair by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA) White Rhino Species Survival Plan® (SSP), which helps to ensure genetic diversity and the continued growth of the southern white rhino population in AZA accredited facilities. The new calf, who will be named by her keepers at a later date, and Mosi’s genetics are considered especially valuable due to their parents’ origin. Zina was born at the Singapore Zoo in 2013 and Sibindi was born in South Africa in 2006. The birth of these offspring marks the first time their genetics have been represented in an American zoo.

Southern white rhinos are native to South Africa, where they are found almost exclusively, and have been introduced to Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Eswatini. They have been classified as Near Threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with poaching for their horns being the largest threat to them in the wild. This threat has already resulted in extinction and near-extinction of other rhino species.

“This baby is invaluable to the long-term survival of the species.” Greg Bockheim, Executive

Director of the Virginia Zoo, said. “And like her older brother, she could not be more adorable.”

In the wild, southern white rhinos’ median life expectancy is about 36 years, but they may live to be older than 40 in human care. The gestation period averages around 16 months, the second longest in the animal kingdom behind elephants.

White rhinos are not actually white in color. Their name comes from the Afrikaans word wyd, meaning “wide”, which references the animals’ mouth shape but was misinterpreted by early English settlers as “white.”

.@JohnLeguizamo stops by to call bulls**t on Univision's softball Trump interview pic.twitter.com/3p45N0ZChm

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) November 23, 2023

Let’s hope people listen … and that the Democrats put some serious money and effort into counteracting what these greed heads are doing.

Do they not realize that Trump thinks they all come from shithole countries?

Will they be able to overcome their differences to keep the government open?

The Republicans have managed to pass some of the appropriations bills from the floor (although most of them are going to meet heavy resistance in the conference) so they aren’t starting from scratch after the first of the year. But there are a few that they just can’t seem to come to terms on. Here are some of the reasons:

Agriculture 

House GOP leadership has struggled for months to pass the party’s annual agriculture and rural development funding bill amid divides over spending and measures aimed at restricting abortion access. 

The bill was one of the first the party sought to bring to the floor in the summer. But leadership scrapped plans for a vote in July as hard-line conservatives pressed for steeper cuts to overall funding levels while moderates came out against the bill over language that sought to limit access to an abortion pill known as mifepristone. 

The bill — which funds the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and other related agencies — ultimately failed when it came up for a vote in September over the same issues.

And while some are hopeful the party will eventually be able to get it across the finish line, others are doubtful.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), chair of the subcommittee that crafted the funding bill, said earlier this month the House should “go to conference with the Senate with what we have” instead of opting for another floor vote. 

“There are members who have said, look, they can’t vote for that bill with the mifepristone language in and there are a whole lot more members who said they can’t vote for that bill with the mifepristone language out,” Harris told The Hill then. “There is no solution to it.”  

“So, that means, let’s go to conference with what we have and bring a conferenced product back to the floor,” he said. 

If it’s about abortion, the Senate Democrats aren’t going to budge. But who knows what Joe Manchin will do? (Sinema is firmly pro-choice, at least.) Still, Biden would veto it, obviously. And the Dems will be happy to take that to the voters in November.

Financial Services and General Government 

Reproductive rights also played a role in House Republicans canceling a vote on their annual financial services and general government funding bill earlier this month, as did funding for an FBI headquarters.   

Some moderate Republicans said they opposed the bill over language seeking to prohibit Washington, D.C., from carrying out a law that aims to protect people from employer discrimination based on their reproductive health decisions. 

The bill also faced pushback from some in the right flank amid scrutiny of the FBI. Conservatives have accused the agency of political weaponization and pushed for the measure to include language barring funding for a new FBI headquarters.  

Some also said the measure didn’t go far enough to cut spending, despite a proposal to claw back billions of dollars in IRS funding passed in the previous Democratic-led Congress in hopes of offsetting spending in the bill.  

Among the offices the bill covers funding for includes the Treasury Department, the executive office of the president and the General Services Administration, which constructs and manages federal buildings. 

Ditto.

Transportation, Housing and Urban Development 

House Republicans punted plans to bring up their annual transportation and housing funding bill twice this month, as some moderates took issue with proposed cuts to Amtrak. 

“Some people want to cut more, other people are worried that we cut too much, or they’ve got particular concerns, Amtrak concerns,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who heads the spending subcommittee that crafted the bill, told The Hill earlier this month. 

Moderates, especially those from New York, voiced concerns about a drop in Amtrak funding of more than $1 billion below fiscal 2023 levels. 

“I think that many of us are comfortable reining in federal spending, but not disproportionately impacting our region,” Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.) told reporters this month, adding that proposed cuts in the bill “are just too significant.” 

But there had also been criticism in the right flank among members pressing for lower funding in the bill, which covers funding for offices like the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, that the bill didn’t go far enough to lower funding.  

I think the wingnuts will cave on this one. They will want to protect their New York delegation.

Commerce, Justice and Science 

A group of mostly hard-line conservatives recently tanked consideration of the party’s bill to fund the Department of Justice for most of next year, as some opposed the bill’s proposals for the FBI among other issues. 

“The bill itself didn’t go far enough to defund some of the policies and practices going on with [the] Department of Justice and FBI, weaponization of the government,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), who was among the GOP members that opposed the bill, said at the time. 

“It also increases spending instead of cutting spending of all departments, that’s not the one we should be doing that for,” he said of the sweeping bill, which also provides funding for the Department of Commerce, NASA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Office on Violence Against Women and other operations. 

Several moderates also helped block consideration of the bill on the procedural vote, raising concerns about how certain proposals would impact public safety. 

“There was specific grant funding that trickles down to the Suffolk County Police Department and other Long Island police departments that, if this bill was ultimately approved, would have made public safety a worse issue on Long Island,” Rep. Nick LaLota (N.Y.), another “no” vote, argued. “It would have made affordability a worse issue on Long Island.” 

“Defund the police” is an excellent policy. It works wonders. They should put that one front and center.

Labor, Health and Human Services 

Another bill Republicans hoped to pass before leaving Washington on Wednesday would have funded the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education for most of next year. 

However, that bill also proposed steep cuts that faced staunch resistance from some moderates. 

The bill sought to prohibit Planned Parenthood-affiliated clinics from receiving funding, slash funding for Title I grants for states with schools where “children from low-income families make up at least 40 percent of enrollment” and laid out double-digit percentage cuts to discretionary funds for Labor, HHS and Education, according to a legislative summary. 

Republicans say the bill would cut funding for programs under its purview by more than $60 billion compared to enacted levels in fiscal 2023, drawing backing from some hard-line conservatives pressing for more aggressive action to tackle the nation’s growing debt.  

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said there’s “not a lot of cuts that were missed and they cut $60 billion out.” 

“That means there’s some significant cuts,” Simpson said, adding that bothers “a lot of people.” 

Ya think?

Good luck to America with all this. It’s possible that they will find a way to pass these with promises of a good conference outcome. And they may even be able to keep the government from shutting down in the process. But Mike Johnson is in big trouble if those moderates win on any of it. And since he’s a hard-core, far right anti abortion extremists it’s hard to imagine he’ll go that way.