I see you’re beating that “8 missing Republicans” horse again. We discussed that previously (don’t have time to find the thread now), and it concerns whether or not to use the nuclear option. Now, that’s an issue – whether to activate that option or not – that could be debated (and has been). But short of the nuclear option, those 8 missing senators are irrelevant, and that’s why they were missing.

As Mitchell Strand continues, they (the Democrats) will be confident in their ability to fool enough of the people enough of the time, figuring correctly that enough “people will forget that we’re 38 trillion in debt, until Trump wants to spend money on anything, at which point, they’ll be ‘clown nose off’ and clutch their pearls about money again.”

Col. Douglas Macgregor points out that during WWII, when our military forces had expanded to 12 million or so, we had only seven four star generals, but that today, when our entire military force consists of only a little more than a million men, we now have 40 or so four star generals.*

Macgregor also thought that it was possible that the issue of the large percentage of women in our armed forces–15 or 20%–and the wish to reduce that percentage to around 5%–might be a topic, as might Affirmative Action promotions.

* See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gu45MLyh48

Clicking through to neo’s Link, found this nugget down in the bottom:

An effort to consider the bill in the Senate hours later was scuttled when most Democrats, along with two Republicans, opposed a vote to begin debating the measure.

Oh, really. Mysteriously not named. But if you click on a link in that article you find Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowksi voting with the D’s, and Fetterman voting with the R’s, so it failed 48-44.

48+44 = 92. Why are 8 missing, who are they? Look at the vote on the Senate.gov page. Eight Republican Senators didn’t even vote. This is theater. Had they voted this would have passed!

If it was really important, if the GOP leadership actually meant it, they would never let it fail with less than 51 voting against and all Republican Senators having to vote. Votes are negotiated, that is the function of the Whips.

One more time we’re getting rolled by narrative because we believe the story and don’t click through to the facts.

In my day job, I attended a panel discussion not long ago where it came up that the sunsetting of the Obamacare subsidies can be used as leverage for some other flavors of health care reform. Some of the people in that discussion were Trump administration and Republican Senate staffers–no one from the D side was represented–so one more reason I think a compromise is in the offing that may get deliver some small amount of good at least on paper, but at the same time will allow the hogs to continue to feed at the trough.

The tell will be one side gets to talk-talk about how they owned the libs, but the checks will keep going out the door to the people the Dems (and too many of the GOP) want them to go to.

We had all that fuss and feathers about DOGE, in the end infinitesimal cuts were made, and now we are, I’m afraid, in the process of undoing those cuts in exchange for talk-talk.

https://x.com/PeteHegseth/status/1971532130712002775
https://x.com/general_ben/status/1971508877394063576

It appears that Schumer et al. are arguing that Obama- and Biden- and Covid-specific spending legislation should be rendered more-or-less permanent. Thus undoing the “roll back” of those programs done by the Repubs in their effort to somewhat reduce federal spending commitments.

Recall Pres. Reagan’s quip about the “eternal life” of government programs. The Trump team seems to be really trying to do something about our out of control federal spending, and the Dems are either unwilling to compromise or are trying to use the Trumpy negotiation tactic of asking for the impossible while silently willing to settle for somewhat less. I guess we’ll see. It seems quite brilliant of Trump to put fed employees on the line as the major cost of the Schumer strategy, whatever it may be…..

* See https://www.theblaze.com/news/fbi-had-275-plainclothes-agents-embedded-in-jan-6-crowds-congressional-source-says