Paging Joseph Heller to the white courtesy phone.

This is a case where Betteridge’s law of headlines clearly applies. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteri...

“Further official comments will be limited, to preserve the integrity of the proceedings.”

My MAGA-to-English translation is weak but I’m disposed to read this as “now that we’ve made the absurd threat we’re never going to follow it up OR walk it back. It’s just going to sit on the table stinking.”

Not stipulated that “it suspects” is the correct formulation. It would be correct to write “it says it suspects” or “it claims it suspects”. There is no basis for the assumption of good faith implicit in what you wrote.

Not an ocean, ok. But everyone knows the Great Lakes are seas. Duh. And your map is about THE SEA.

Booyah.

ISTM it’s fair to say the Senate Repubs own the shutdown because they could pass the present bill with their own votes alone, and the House Repubs own it because they could reconvene and negotiate. So in toto, the Republicans own it, lock, stock, and barrel.

I’m obvs not OP but AFAICT if they wanted to negotiate like oh say every Congress ever in the past, they would need the House. Sure, narrowly about passing the present text it’s about the Senate.

I would never claim to speak for “the people” (I suppose that’s why I’ll never be a politician) but that sure resonates with me.

“The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat”.

I see it’s time to break out Harry S Truman again (www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/ad...)

A dangerous allergy to tiny little crowds or being booed?

As I recall, the argument is the marginal cost to send is nil and the value of reeling in a single mark is substantial, so even if you have to send out a million texts to get one response, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But also, no.

Yeah, if I were an alum of one of these once-proud university systems I’d be pissed.

Students who have a choice will avoid Texas as well. Source: my kid is a high school senior, and I know what factors they’re considering.

You’re clearly right that state leadership won’t care, though. See also Florida.

As before, positive feedback couldn’t be pigeonholed to a particular type. Young, old, Mercedes, jacked-up trucks, delivery vans, all ethnicities.

The vibe was positive and joyful.

Both times we had protestors spread out along the main road leading to the Michigan stadium on a game day. This time I counted two middle fingers and one incoherent rant, out of thousands of cars over the course of two hours. I forget the count from last time but it was more than single digits.

Happily (?) the company has a moral-hazard-as-a-service URL rewriter that takes all the guesswork out of it and encourages me to blindly click URLs I receive in random emails, because they promise to take care of the thinking.

Sometimes out-of-sequence delivery is just a minor oops. One can imagine a scenario where it could cause major heartburn though. Fortunately my incident was of the former variety.

Now that you mention it, the arrows provide an extra extra layer of redundancy.