Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Biden doesn't even have enough support among the Democrats to repeal the f***ing filibuster.

There’s a character in Viz called Wee Radge Joe, about a diminutive Scotsman with a foul temper who always gets in arguments with others, and because he “can’t let it go,” the strip normally ends with him suffering some form of injury or other.

The anonymity of the internet protects our own wee radgies from a similar fate.

At least 10 US states have siphoned millions of dollars from federal block grants, meant to provide aid to their neediest families, to pay for the operations of ideological anti-abortion clinics.

These overwhelmingly Republican-led states used money from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (Tanf), better known as welfare or direct cash aid, to fund the activities of anti-abortion clinics associated with the evangelical right. The clinics work to dissuade women from obtaining abortions.

In all cases, the states used these funds even as Covid-19 caused the worst economic upheaval in nearly a century, left one in four families without enough to eat, and resulted in mass layoffs that had a disproportionate effect on low-income and racial minority Americans.
[...]
Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Texas have all used federal Tanf funds to support anti-abortion clinics.
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These 10 states funneled the money through “Alternatives to Abortion” programs, part of state budgets established by conservative legislatures and often run through state health departments. They not only send millions in federal welfare funds, but also state taxpayer dollars to such centers.
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Since 2006, Texas has sent $45m in federal welfare funds to crisis pregnancy centers. Texas has extraordinarily strict income limits for its welfare program – a family of four can earn no more than $231 per month to be eligible.
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Today, there are more than 2,500 ideologically focused, anti-abortion clinics, compared with just 800 abortion providers. But those figures don’t tell the whole story, as they are dramatically skewed in states hostile to abortion rights.

In some states, the balance is one abortion provider to 15 anti-abortion clinics. In Missouri, that balance is one to 74, as the state has worked aggressively to shut down its only remaining abortion clinic, a Planned Parenthood in St Louis.
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Pennsylvania’s Alternatives to Abortion program gave $30m to Real Alternatives alone from state and federal funds from 2012 to 2017. Real Alternatives then used that money to set up pregnancy centers in Michigan, using “hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania taxpayer dollars to fund its activities in other states”, Pennsylvania’s auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, said in 2017.

“It is just as outrageous that the state grant agreement was so weak that it allowed this practice to go on for decades siphoning funds intended to benefit Pennsylvania women experiencing crisis pregnancies,” the auditor general said.

Despite the problems these programs have encountered, their popularity continues to grow among conservative legislators. Arkansas, Arizona and Iowa all sought to establish Alternatives to Abortion programs in 2021, even amid the pandemic-devastated economy.

Repealing archaic Senate rules is legitimate.

Nor do you have the guts to stand up to any one in person.

You’re constantly on the radge though.

Nor do you have the guts to stand up to any one in person.

Yup!
I see the danger of repealing the filibuster, but it HAS to go.

"On the radge"
😁