not nearly enough, clearly.

Category 5 hurricanes strike the United States an average of once every 3 years.

A lot more often than pandemics like this one.

A way lot more often than global pandemics.

And where have the most recent big storms hit? New Orleans. Houston. Florida. And, if you believe Donald Trump, Alabama. Those are all pretty red states, aren't they?

No. New Orleans and Houston are cities. Also, Louisiana has had a Democratic governor since 2016 and isn't very "pretty" either. :)

"Rather large"? You spelled "breathtakingly ginormous" incorrectly, and there is no way in Hell that Pelosi's bill is ever going to pass the Senate.

Her bill, which the House will vote for on Friday, contains $3 billion in federal spending, much of it to help state and local governments devastated by the economic crash get through the crisis.

Three "billion"? You spelled "trillion" wrong.

Have you been drinking alcoholic beverages? ;)

Hopefully, that won't be the only judicial reinstatement in the works - if you know what I mean and I'm sure that you do!

Heh. :)

Seems to me that people in blue states should realize that this is evidence of the charade that the two party system is and reject both parties as the model clearly doesn't work since it does not make the red states capable of being productive on their own instead of being a constant drain on the blue states.

You missed the whole point of CW’s article! The system is working the way it is supposed to work — sending federal tax money (which is neither blue nor red) to the places that need it the most. We know that many states won’t be able to produce enough in federal tax money to cover what they need in federal assistance. That’s the reason that we pool all of our tax money before we distribute it to where it is needed.

there's a lot of constitution to interpret, so it's not always clear-cut where to draw the line between pretending it says something it doesn't and realizing it already says something we hadn't considered.

JL

I know. But, I still think it matters what YOU think, Dan.

I'm frequently annoyed that the universally accepted solution, when the Constitution says something someone doesn't like, is to ignore what it says and just pretend that it says something else. And that if you can win a majority of seats on the Supreme Court, this is accepted as completely legitimate. Some things really are blurry. What does it mean, exactly, to deprive a person of liberty without due process of law? But some things are entirely clear and unambiguous. The current example is that states choose presidential electors however the legislatures say to, and then those electors vote. Not the states. Not the ordinary voters of the states. Yes, we should get rid of the electoral college, and either go to a meaningful parliamentary system where the electors make a real choice, or else go to a system where the president is actually elected by the voters on election day. But we shouldn't do it by closing our eyes and saying "I do believe in fairies" over and over.

The people you cite are up to something else. And, if you can't see that, ...

It doesn't matter what I personally can or can't see, nor does it matter what you can. It does matter how it looks to millions of similarly situated people. What I can see is Biden losing what should have been part of his base. But I can't see him being able to afford that loss.

[32] of previous thread:
WTF? Why would he want to be, much less NEED to be, tolerable to ”people who consider it axiomatic that a man has an absolute entitlement to put his hands ...

Because this is the U. S. of A., where 62,979,636 people voted for putting babies in cages. The voters here really are that extreme. They voted for it as part of a package deal, not à la carte. But there was nothing in the package that was much better.

A little empty, perhaps? The Democrats, bless their noble liberal souls, really do not, as you say, begrudge the regular federal wealth transfer from blue to red in the course of the national social contract. So it's kind of hard to believe the threat you issue here, that the Dems will suddenly change their stripes and get vicious with Florida over aid for the next hurricane, or with Kentucky over the next funding bill for federal welfare and poverty programs. I imagine McConnell's pretty used to empty threats from liberal commentators about how this outrage, no this one, is the final straw and now we're going to get tough on you.

And in the opening paragraph, probably 3 trillion, not billion. I bet it's hard to write 3 trillion; it's not a number that comes up a lot in the usual discussions of federal bills for this and that.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/13/biden-sanders-unity-task-forces-leaders-aoc-254456

Yeah, well, whatever … I guess the need to unify the party must come before the task of unifying the country.

But, all in all, off to a good start!

You should send this a column, or one revamped to be especially in tune with the senate leader's state, to all the major newspapers in Kentucky and perhaps to other states that are net federal tax receivers.