Cowardly Dem Sens Miss Opportunity
“A cynic knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde
It appears to me that we’re headed for another crescendo in the drama being staged by the administration of Donald J Trump.
As I write this, Senate democrats are poised to remind everyone why people didn't show up to vote for their party in 2024. The rest of this column will be based on the supposition that at least eight people in the Senate voted Yes for a continuing resolution to (sorta) keep things as they are in government.
If I’m wrong –I would love to be– you can take the rest of the day off.
Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer (who woke up to hundreds of protesters outside his house this morning) says he’s going to vote Yes and will be joined by enough party members to pass the resolution.
Failure to pass this resolution would result in a government shutdown. Pundits are beside themselves saying closing non-essential parts of the federal government will poll poorly, even warning that such a move will prevent Democrats from regaining control of congress in 2026.
What’s gonna take to convince those people that the government is already substantially shut down by DOGE?
Today’s polling says the only people that would blame Democrats for a shutdown are the typical 30-35% MAGA-types who support Trump/Republicans no matter what.
Democrats had absolutely no responsibilities in this situation except to stand up against fascism. Even the union (American Federation of Government Employees) representing 800,000 government employees supported a No vote.
With thousands of federal workers either fired, placed on administrative leave, or at immediate risk of losing their jobs, AFGE members have concluded that a widespread government shutdown has been underway since January 20 and will continue to spread whether senators vote yes or no on H.R. 1968. Under the current CR, federal workers are being treated no better than they will be if government funding ceases Friday night.
Yes, it is true that workers who have not yet been fired are at least drawing a paycheck - for now. But if H.R. 1968 becomes law — a measure that ignores the administration's brazen refusal to carry out duly enacted laws of Congress and further erodes Congress's power of the purse - AFGE knows that DOGE will dramatically expand its terminations of federal workers and double down on its campaign to make federal agencies fail because there will be nothing left to stop the Administration for the balance of fiscal year 2025 if ever.
What’s even worse is that it’s a bullshit bill that does NOT continue government spending as agreed to in the last continuing resolution. This was written by Republicans who couldn’t be bothered with bipartisanship, and moved through the House of Representatives in a manner forcing the Senate to take it or leave it as is.
It cuts non-defense spending $13 billion below last year’s level, while increasing military spending by $6 billion. It eliminates money for programs that fund homeless shelters and prevent child abuse and adds money for mass deportations.
But here’s the really bullshit part of the deal: the Trump administration has drawn up plans to impound federal funds allocated by the continuing resolution. The fact that this is against the law won’t stop them at this point, since they plan to argue before the Supreme Court that the 1974 law specifically barring presidential impoundment is unconstitutional.
While denying Republicans the necessary votes to pass a continuing resolution seemed like a simple way to stick it to the man, there’s no easy way out for Democrats once a shutdown starts. It’s not like Republicans are going to agree to a compromise, when the government is already being hollowed out from within.
The good news, as we’ve already seen repeatedly in the foreign policy arena, is that the bully in the executive office backs down when confronted. We’ve already seen that he’s a wobbler on tariffs, so ending a stand-off by calling Congress back into session (accompanied by bombasity like you’ve never heard) is the likely conclusion.
Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted. In a perfect world where Trump’s favorability wasn’t crashing along with the stock market, a budget showdown might be a losing proposition. I’d say the odds of Republican unity needed to keep their bill intact go down every time the President opens his mouth.
What will it be? An invasion of Panama? More tariffs? Amnesty for child abusers? Or maybe an endorsement of a social media post from his Number Two reading “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did?”
The point is, there’s no time like the present. And if the spineless Democratic jellyfish in the Senate won’t act, fine. Chances are good that the GOP will retain control of that body in upcoming elections (based on what states have contests).
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The US Department of Agriculture cut $1 billion used to buy food from local farms for schools and food banks. The funding helped small farmers and provided free school lunches for kids in need.
When asked on “Fox and Friends” how this move was defensible, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins insisted it wasn’t going to impact schools and called the programs,“ food justice for trans people in New York and San Francisco.” (h/t Lyz)
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NASA, Yale, and Stanford Scientists Consider 'Scientific Exile,' French University Says by Emanuel Matberg at 404 Media
Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university, invited American scientists who believe their work is at risk of being censored by Donald Trump administration’s anti-science policies to continue their research in France. Today, the university announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States.
“We are witnessing a new brain drain,” Éric Berton, Aix Marseille University’s president, said in a press release. “We will do everything in our power to help as many scientists as possible continue their research. However, we cannot meet all demands on our own. The Ministry of Education and Research is fully supporting and assisting us in this effort, which is intended to expand at both national and European levels.”
The press release from the university claims that researchers from Stanford, Yale, NASA, the National Institute of Health, George Washington University, “and about 15 other prestigious institutions," are now considering “scientific exile.” More than 40 American scientists have expressed interest in the program, it said. Their key research areas are “health (LGBT+ medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, inequalities, immunology, etc.), environment and climate change (natural disaster management, greenhouse gases, social impact, artificial intelligence), humanities and social sciences (communication, psychology, history, cultural heritage), astrophysics.”
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They're coming for the right to protest by Lisa Needham at Public Notice
Since there’s no way to make any criminal charges stick to Khalil, the administration has resorted to citing a law that allows deportation of “an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” This allowed Marco Rubio to revoke Khalil’s green card so he could be deported.
The use of this provision is exceedingly rare. According to the New York Times, it’s been invoked exactly once, by former President Bill Clinton in 1995, when he tried to deport a former Mexican government official, Mario Ruiz Massieu. Massieu sued, leading to a lower court decision declaring the provision unconstitutional because it was impossible for someone to know if their “mere presence here would or could cause adverse foreign policy consequences when our foreign policy is unpublished, ever-changing, and often highly confidential.” The judge who penned those words is none other than Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s sister. The case was later overturned on unrelated grounds.
Earlier this week, Rubio said that people like Khalil “don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with” and that they would never have been let in if they had explained they supported Hamas or intended to protest. Rubio is also playing tough guy over at Elon Musk’s Nazi bar, posting that the administration “will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
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Can’t Wrap Your Head Around Pi? Here’s a Cool Visual to Help by Rhett Alain at Wired
Happy Pi Day! We celebrate pi on March 14 because 3-14 gives the first three digits of this famous number. But what’s the big deal about pi anyway? Why does it get a day? Well, for starters, it defines the simplest, most perfect shape, the circle. So it’s everywhere around you. Pi is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle: π = C/d.
No matter how big or small a circle is, that ratio is always the same. In decimal notation, it’s 3.141592653 … aaand you can run that out as far as you want, because it’s an irrational number, and it never, ever, ever ends.
What people do—in fact what calculators do if you press the π button—is choose a certain number of decimal places, depending on the precision required, and round off to that number. It’s not really pi, but you could say … it’s a piece of pi. (Sorry, but every Pi Day story needs a pi pun.)
