Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. Beth says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 04:31

   https://www.offmessage.net/p/a-betrayal

   On Thursday night, Senate Democrats proved Burr’s point. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he will provide the deciding vote to give Musk and Trump a blank check. Fund the government without any mechanism to make the Trump administration follow the law, plus a bunch of extra right-wing goodies thrown in for good measure. Most Senate Democrats will oppose that bill, but they will also go along with the ruse that they were simply outnumbered. That the fix wasn’t in. That there’s no reason to throw out the leaders who hung them out to dry.

   They were not guaranteed to win, but they did choose not to fight.

   Fucking Bill Burr gets it. Holy Shit, this is the Bad Place.

   6
2. Scott says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 07:35

   It was all for show and a waste of money. Government as theater.

   Trump administration flies all remaining Guantánamo migrants back to U.S.

   The Trump administration has removed all the migrants who were being held at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba and flown them back to the United States, a Defense Department official said Wednesday.

   The 40 men have been transported to Louisiana, where there is a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alexandria. It comes two weeks after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent another group of 48 migrants back to the same city from Guantánamo.

   It is unclear why DHS routed the group of migrants back to the United States after the costly flights to the military base on Cuba.

   4
3. Jen says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 10:15

   Former Senator Alan Simpson has died, age 93. You may remember him from back when it was okay for a Republican to hold pro-choice stances.

   2
4. CSK says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 10:19

   @Jen:

   Those were the days, my friend…
5. charontwo says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 10:21

   @Jen:

   I remember him from the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill thing – not favorably.

   Of course, I don’t remember Orrin Hatch, Arlen Spector or Joe Biden favorably either.

   1
6. gVOR10 says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 10:33

   Via LGM:

   Mr. Beshear drew a distinction with Mr. Newsom on that issue, as well. In 2022, Mr. Beshear vetoed legislation that would have let student athletes play only in sports based on the sex listed on their birth certificate. His veto was overridden.

   “I think that sports need to be fair, but I believe that our different leagues have more than the ability to make that happen,” Mr. Beshear said on Thursday, adding that the Kentucky high school athletic association had its own rules to prevent any “unfair advantage.”

   “But our Legislature decided they needed to pass something anyways,” he added. “And you know what they did? They took away an opportunity for the only trans athlete we had in our state, who’s a middle schooler, who started a field hockey team at her school that had never had one to make friends.

   Emphasis mine.

   That’s the way you do it. No throwing people under the bus. Minimizing, not amplifying, the GOP’s trivia. Making the GOPs look like the ridiculous assholes they are.

   3
7. gVOR10 says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 10:50

   @Jen: @charontwo: Erik LKoomis at LGM also remembers Simpson.

   Alan Simpson has died. The senator from Wyoming was a mean man. He was always a mean man. Like his friend John McCain, meanness became his currency. He will be remembered as “bipartisan” today because he embodied the Beltway desire to slash deficits by making the poor suffer, the favorite ideology of the Blob. But Alan Simpson was awful in nearly every way. Let’s remember that.
   …
   More importantly for his future than anything else is that his father, the unfortunately named Milward Simpson, was the Wyoming governor from 1954-58 and then U.S. senator from 1962-67 after he won a special election. So everything that Alan did, even when he was a total punk as a kid, was framed by the fact that his father was a powerful guy in a small, insular state and Alan would be A-OK.

   1
8. Kathy says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 11:32

   There goes another one: AA 737 (not MAX*) catches fire after an emergency landing.
9. Jen says:
   Friday, 14 March 2025 at 11:54

   DOGE has ordered TSA to stop spending money on dog food and vet visits for working K-9s.

   Completely unacceptable.
10. Kurtz says:
    Friday, 14 March 2025 at 11:58

    There are no words bad enough that these people wouldn’t wear as a badge of honor.

    U.S. citizen child recovering from brain cancer removed to Mexico with undocumented parents

    [emphases, including bolded italics, mine]

    A family that was deported to Mexico hopes they can find a way to return to the U.S. and ensure their 10-year-old daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, can continue her brain cancer treatment.

    Immigration authorities removed the girl and four of her American siblings from Texas on Feb. 4, when they deported their undocumented parents.

    The family’s ordeal began last month, when they were rushing from Rio Grande City, where they lived, to Houston, where their daughter’s specialist doctors are based, for an emergency medical checkup.

    A 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer, from the United States was deported with her undocumented parents last month.

    The parents had done the trip at least five other times in the past, passing through an immigration checkpoint every time without any issues, according to attorney Danny Woodward from the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal advocacy and litigation organization representing the family. In previous occasions, the parents showed letters from their doctors and lawyers to the officers at the checkpoint to get through.

    But in early February, the letters weren’t enough. When they stopped at the checkpoint, they were arrested after the parents were unable to show legal immigration documentation. The mother, who spoke exclusively to NBC News, said she tried explaining her daughter’s circumstances to the officers, but “they weren’t interested in hearing that.”

    Other than lacking “valid immigration status in the U.S.,” the parents have “no criminal history,” Woodward said.

    I just want to make sure I have my math correct. I think I need a scratch pad. They wanted to remove two undocumented parents, which necessitated they remove 5 American citizens?

    Trump folks should be careful what they wish for. They opened the door. I say remove Musk and make him prove he didn’t lie on his forms. That’s how this works, right?

    Eff Guantanamo, I can think of a few places to drop him. The cruelty is the point, right
    What was that about opposing evil to fight an evil?

    This is exactly the outcome that experts, including Steven, warned about.

    Reminder: they removed American citizens.
11. charontwo says:
    Friday, 14 March 2025 at 12:01

    French Senator:

    There is an English translation after the French part, but I activated Translate to make the French English.

    https://www.independants-senat.fr/post/claude-malhuret-situation-en-ukraine-et-s%C3%A9curit%C3%A9-en-europe
12. Fortune says:
    Friday, 14 March 2025 at 12:13

    @Kurtz: I thought we weren’t supposed to separate families.
13. Scott says:
    Friday, 14 March 2025 at 12:16

    Update on Texas measles outbreak:

    The Texas Department of State Health Services is reporting an outbreak of measles in the South Plains and Panhandle regions of Texas. At this time, 259 cases have been identified since late January. Thirty-four of the patients have been hospitalized.

    There has been one fatality in a school-aged child who lived in the outbreak area. The child was not vaccinated and had no known underlying conditions.

    Due to the highly contagious nature of this disease, additional cases are likely to occur in the outbreak area and the surrounding communities. DSHS is working with local health departments to investigate the outbreak.

    From CDC:

    U.S. Cases in 2024
    Total cases: 285

    So in 3 months Texas alone has almost exceeded all of 2024 in the United States.
14. Kathy says:
    Friday, 14 March 2025 at 12:19

    Some years ago I had a story idea that I hoped could be a novel. I wrote the first chapter and stopped. There are two problems. One is the focus is not on the character it should be. The other is to solve the first problem I’ve to write very violent, emotional scenes and mistreat the main character, and I can’t do that.

    The gist of the story is that a trans woman, Michelle*, is attacked in a secluded place (where else?). The assailant then decides to kill her when he finds out she’s transgender. In fighting him off, the thug gets killed.

    The police detective in charge, Alyssa, concludes it’s self defense. No charges are warranted. Well and good, right? But then the assistant DA thinks he can score an easy murder conviction to advance his career.

    The problem is the story as I plotted it centers on Alyssa. She comes to know Michelle well in the process, and admires her for several reasons**. But her professional responsibilities require her to make the arrest and, in effect, join in with Michelle’s oppressors. That’s not a bad character focus, but damned if I’ll write a story where a transgender character is essential but not central.

    To place Michelle at the center, though, I’d have to fully write the scene where she gets attacked, when she gets outed in the hospital in front of the police, and that on top of several courtroom scenes where the assistant DA is actually conducting a witch hunt.

    I find it hard to be mean to central characters and to make them suffer.

    There’s a third problem that the story includes fantasy elements (visions, pretty much). The novel would work without them, but would lose a lot of emotional punch.

    *The name was going to be Althea, but then I settled on her lawyers name being Athena, and the two names are too close in spelling and pronunciation, so things could get confusing.
15. Bill Jempty says:
    Monday, 17 March 2025 at 15:34

    Testing….1….2…3…4