Heritage's supposed Social Security "solutions" would reduce benefits while siphoning revenue out of the system.

"Every time a purported savior of Social Security floats a proposal to supposedly protect the program by reducing future benefits, people should be reminded of an observation made by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman more than a decade ago:

The risk is that we might, at some point in the future, have to cut benefits; to avoid this risk of future benefit cuts, we are supposed to act pre-emptively by...cutting future benefits. What problem, exactly, are we solving here?"

. . .

The reality is that privatization schemes for Social Security have been bandied about for decades — the Brookings Institution, The Century Foundation, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities all tackled privatization efforts during the Clinton and Bush administrations — and they always serve as a Trojan horse to dismantle the program.

Privatization schemes would replace a federally guaranteed benefit available to tens of millions of working Americans with a volatile investment account subject to the whims of the business cycle, with no clear protections against economic downturns or other risk factors.

Telling the female part of a graduating class that all the effort and money they spent getting their degree and all their life ambitions should be canned for (or secondary to) domestic servitude and becoming breeding livestock is unacceptable. It is as intolerable as parents, churches, doctors, and politicians telling women and girls they should or have to do these things and that their ambitions and accomplishments are secondary or don't matter at all. Worse, passing legislation to force pregnancy and childbirth, no matter what the circumstance; staying in harmful or abusive marriages, no matter what the circumstance -- as if women are just property. These attitudes are precisely the crap I fought against all my life. I knew early on (remember my dear Mom telling me): "It's YOUR life."

And that is what those women should have been told: "It's YOUR life." That prick was way out of line. If we don't call this stuff out, if there are no consequences and pushback, and if we don't tell them to stay in their damn lane, this crap will continue for more generations. And what a shame. What a goddamned shame. And speaking of 'God,' what deity worth worshipping would say, insinuate, believe, or teach that is the purpose of half the human population on Earth? None that I want anything to do with, for sure. Whether God said such things as Butker and other men claim God said or men interpret God's alleged words as they want to hear them is up for debate. I lean heavily toward the latter, though, since the world's major religions are subject only to patriarchal interpretation. It is a spirit-crushing meat grinder that needs to end. If I wanted to have any relationship with God, I'd have to first get around all that. It's a hell of a mountain range to climb to see if a God is worth having a relationship with on the other side.

These men are obstacles to, not interpreters of God. How dare they believe they have any right to that or girls' or women's bodies, dreams, spirits, lives, careers, and ambitions? Who the hell do they think they are?

Who funds the CO2 Coalition?

Created in 2015, the coalition is a nonprofit based in Arlington, Va., with a revenue of $1.06 million in 2022, the latest data available from public documents. The coalition doesn’t list many of its donors.

“It is a front-group tied to the fossil fuel industry and conservative funders. They’re shills, promoting untruthful or misleading claims,” said Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mann’s work was included in a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. “The coalition isn’t a legitimate source of science,” he said.

Coalition funders have included the conservative Mercer Family Foundation, a major Trump donor, according to Grantmakers.io, a public IRS data site; the Charles Koch Foundation, connected to Koch Industries, which has owned oil refineries and pipelines, and has conducted a “climate change disinformation campaign,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit that studies climate change; and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation Inc., which supports groups that fight critical race theory, according to SourceWatch, part of the progressive Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog organization.

This is how MAGA, conservative men, and the Talibangelicals believe childbearing-age women & girls should be treated. This is what they consider them to be: state-owned breeding livestock:

USSC has done a catch and kill (rather, catch and delay so it can be killed) operation on Trump's January 6th case. They took it to delay it, much like David Pecker bought negative stories about Donald Trump to "kill" them so that they were never published. . . .

TWO THINGS:

1. They took the January 6th case to DELAY IT. That is all. When they take indisputably criminal cases (no disagreement from any courts or juries on the way to the USSC) just for the delay, that's a clue. Otherwise, they'd have not taken that case.

2. When they take previously decided cases to overturn them and cases intended to impose ideologies that are very unpopular with the general American public, that's a clue. Such cases are being massively shoveled up to this court by the Koch/Federalist Society (on orders from the same) for MAGA to finally get what it wants from this court because they can't get it legislatively or at the ballot box.

Roe v Wade: overturned. Affirmative Action: overturned. VRA: destroyed. COMING SOON: LGBTQ rights: soon to be destroyed. Access to and use of birth control and medication abortion: on their list. Civil Rights Act: soon to be destroyed.

Rep. Jamie Raskin said that the USSC offices should be moved to RNC HQ. At this point, at least six of the so-called "justices" should move there to allow six actual justices to be installed in their place. Of course, that won't happen but functionally, it should.

It should be clear to anyone and everyone why those six conservative justices -- and particularly the last three appointed -- are there. Donald Trump and his team celebrated when the USSC took the January 6th case, and he called them "my justices". There is no pretending that any concern for justice, the rule of law, or integrity exists on the part of that court those six justices occupy. . .

A source close to Trump told Rolling Stone: “We already pulled off the heist,” and noted that it doesn’t matter to them what the Supreme Court decides now, because the Jan 6th case has already been so delayed.

Here are six key facts that show immigrants are not hurting the employment outcomes of U.S.-born workers.


The unemployment rate for U.S.-born workers averaged 3.6% in 2023, the lowest rate on record. Obviously, immigration is not causing high unemployment among U.S.-born workers.

The share of prime-age U.S.-born individuals with a job is at its highest rate in more than two decades. In 2023, the prime-age (ages 25–54) employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) for U.S.-born individuals was 81.4%, up from 80.7% in 2019 and now at its highest rate since 2001.2, 3

The prime-age labor force participation rate (LFPR) for U.S.-born individuals is also at its highest rate in more than two decades. In 2023, the LFPR for prime-age U.S.-born individuals was 83.9%, up from 83.3% in 2019 and now at its highest rate since 2002. Further, the increase in the U.S.-born prime-age LFPR over the last year was the second highest on record—below only the increase that occurred the year before last.4, 5

The prime-age LFPR of U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s degree grew at a record pace in each of the last two years and is above its pre-COVID trend. We focus here on prime-age men without a bachelor’s degree because though the immigrant population is comprised of men and women of all education levels, immigrants are somewhat disproportionately concentrated among men without a college degree (in 2023, the immigrant share of the overall labor force was 18.6%, but it was 20.0% of men without a college degree). That means that if recent immigration were affecting labor market outcomes of U.S.-born workers, it would be more easily detected among workers in this group. However, the LFPR of these workers is also beating expectations. It is clear the labor market is both absorbing immigrants and generating strong job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, including those in demographic groups potentially most impacted by immigration. 6, 7

It was a missed opportunity for Carlson, who now heads his own startup. But analysts say Putin missed a rare chance to wade convincingly into foreign-policy debates in the U.S., just as the Senate considers additional aid crucial for Ukraine to maintain its defense against the Russian onslaught.

“The Kremlin had got what it wanted: a two-hour platform for Putin to communicate his ideas to the West,” said Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But the propaganda effect was not as strong as the Kremlin intended, because most people will stop listening.”

Key elements from the interview are surfacing in abbreviated form, including Putin’s suggestion that the U.S. should end its support for Ukraine and whether he would consider a prisoner exchange for the freedom of the jailed Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich.

But Putin allotted large chunks of the two-hour interview, aired on Thursday evening on Carlson’s new website, to justify Russia’s historical claim to Ukraine, meandering back to the ninth century at times. Only briefly did he address the partisan fights in the U.S., where Republicans are blocking further aid over border policy disputes.

“Do the United States need this? What for? Thousands of miles away from your national territory! Don’t you have anything better to do?” Putin said about the billions of dollars in military and financial aid the U.S. has given, urging negotiations with Moscow over Ukraine’s fate. “You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt.”