When your cope becomes your hook:
How drag developed drinking problem: 'Everyone expects us to be loud and wasted'...
... bottomless drag brunches are the new norm ... alcohol “is just part and parcel” of being in a gay bar ... A 2021 study by University College London found that LGBTQ+ people are significantly more likely to report alcohol and drug misuse than heterosexual people.
Melania Trump returns to campaign trail with pro-LGBT Republican event appearance: report
Melania, wife of former President Donald Trump, will reportedly be attending a fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans later this month, multiple publications have reported.
Now her account is protected so you can't see her tweets lol.
I should hope so.
Women Scotland, a campaign group, told The Telegraph: “It’s pure harassment and intimidation. They are deliberately going out to cause upset. Women are trying to talk about their lives and are being subject to torrents of sexist and homophobic abuse.”
More.
Discussed here:
"As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000," reports the Journal. "Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million." ...
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was a bit sassier. "Contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited," she wrote in a letter to Rettig. ...
Awkwardly, "revenue agent staffing had actually decreased by 8%, or more than 650 employees, between the end of fiscal 2019 and March 2023," per a previous watchdog report. And it's not just hiring that's in trouble: The agency has completed just 33 percent of its fiscal year 2023 milestones outlined in its strategic operating plan, which is…tough given that the year is over.
The laughs are here:
Our economy has been short labor and probably still is if you talk to and we do talk to a lot of business people, it is still difficult to hire for many, many companies. So we've needed more people. But what happened over the course of last year is to a much greater extent than had been thought. Immigration moved up quite a bit over the last two years.
Meanwhile, full time as a percentage of civilian population DROPPED year over year in the first quarter, according to the employment numbers out today, from 49.7% in 1Q2023 to 49.2% in 1Q2024.
From the story here:
In the final days of the withdrawal, State rushed to notify Afghan allies who had worked with coalition forces that they had been approved for Special Application Visas (SIV) to resettle in the U.S. They sent the notice by email and directed SIV holders to present the document at the Kabul airport for entrance.
But the document that State forwarded had no name, serial number, or other identifying information, Aronson said. Afghans desperate to leave made thousands of copies of the notice, making it impossible to determine who had a legitimate visa and who had a forgery.
The emailed notice that had been “the sole mechanism” for confirming that an Afghan had SIV status and would therefore be allowed into the airport, he said, “became the least reliable mechanism to confirm somebody had an approved SIV.” Adding to the confusion, he told lawmakers the evacuation priority list changed “almost daily,” and that this information was seldom relayed in a timely fashion to the Marines guarding the airport gates.
Remember the good old days when Barack Obama told entrepreneurs who built businesses "You didn't build that"?
Fun times.
We should believe Joe Biden when he denies he proclaimed Easter Sunday the Transgender Day of Visibility, even though it's in his Twitter feed and on the White House website.
Somebody else built that, and it comes as jarring news to him.
He is not in charge, especially of communications. That all goes out under his name and he has little involvement in it.
Biden is more of a figurehead because fatigue combined with the executive functions of the brain he has lost due to old age mean he must rely on others to keep up appearances and meet political expectations, in this case of the hard progressive left.
Democrats should be embarrassed by this guy, but Democrats have no shame.
And Democrat RFK Jr and progressive Shanahan may keep Biden from beating Trump.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/03/29/a-proclamation-on-transgender-day-of-visibility-2024/
Nothing must interfere with Joe's transgender agenda, the first American president officially to push it.
The core pce inflation rate currently is still 75% worse than Trump's 1.6%.
The three year Biden average is 4.31%, which is 169% worse than under Trump.
Real Clear Politics currently shows an average of 64.6% saying the country is on the wrong track.
Utilities are shutting down "dirty" capacity without adequately replacing it. The law of supply and demand means only one thing: higher prices. OK, two: blackouts.
Meanwhile, tax credits under Biden's phony Inflation Reduction Act are masking the true costs of renewables.
From a Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Coming Electricity Crisis: Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point" here :
Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.
The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.
About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.
Some plants are nearing the end of their useful life-spans, but an onslaught of costly regulation is the bigger cause. A soon-to-be-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule would require natural-gas plants to install expensive and unproven carbon capture technology.
The PJM report cites “the role of states and the federal government in subsidizing resources and in environmental regulation.” It added: “The simple fact is that the sources of new capacity that could fully replace the retiring capacity have not been clearly identified.”
Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators.
Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing. This was the main culprit for Texas’s week-long power outage in February 2021 and the eastern U.S.’s rolling blackouts during Christmas 2022.
It's going to be even more funny when The Washington Post blames the Christians for the fires in town.
Farewell -- and good riddance -- to 'typical American family'...
When my partner and I file our annual income taxes in the coming weeks, we'll enjoy a sizable tax break thanks to our decision to tie the knot last fall. And as a dependent on his employer-provided health-insurance plan, I'm able to make a living as a freelancer without worrying about healthcare coverage.
KING CHARLES CALLS FOR MORE KINDNESS IN TIME ON NEED...
King Charles will stress the importance of friendship "especially in a time of need" in his first public address since the Princess of Wales revealed she was undergoing cancer treatment.
Israelis Questioning Their Nation's Dependence on USA...
The [UN] resolution called for a cease-fire as well as the release of hostages, instead of embracing the Israeli position that a cease-fire be predicated on the hostages’ release. ...
The U.S. has rarely used its leverage in the Security Council before to express dissatisfaction with Israel. The last time was in 2016, under the Obama administration, when the U.S. abstained from voting on a resolution that called for a halt to all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.
The story is here:
My insurance was $185/month with a $1,000 deductible. That was for a family of 5. So I voted for Obama-Biden in 2008 based on Obamacare. ... the cheapest insurance I could find to replace that one was $1,200 a month with a $6,000 deductible.
The guy had a great plan before Obama!
But Obamacare as he now thinks he knows it didn't even exist in 2008 for him to base his vote on it.
Obama was for something else, the public option, a government-funded health insurance plan designed to compete with private health insurance. That was also Nancy Pelosi's preference, and the preference of the US House Democrat left at the time.
The great fear was the public option would crowd out private insurance and defeat it because it would be more attractive to women and the chronically ill.
The House public option plan put forward in 2009 competed with the Senate plan, and the two proposals were at an impasse by the end of 2009. Eventually the Senate version prevailed in March of 2010.
The Senate plan was actually worse, what we now call Obamacare.
It dictated the much more expensive nature and new shape of all existing private insurance plans instead of providing a separate public option to compete with those already existing private insurance plans. It cost more to provide because it eliminated pre-existing condition exclusions, and treated men and women equally even though women's care is more costly.
It was fascism pure and simple, government dictating to the private sector what will be, and what will not be.
That's how you lost your old plan, your old doctor, and your money: Because Obama bowed to the Senate plan, instead of fighting for what he said he believed in.
If you were too poor, though, to qualify for Obamacare, you just got stuck with Medicaid, health insurance for the poor, and, failing that, with nothing at all.
The once heralded public option for everyone defaulted to Medicaid. Nearly 86 million are now stuck with that, and most are unaware of its clawback provisions.
Today only 21 million can afford Obamacare, and about 25 million non-elderly adults have bupkis, like the poor fella in the story had for ten years.
Meanwhile, 158 million have employer-provided health insurance, the cost of which climbs relentlessly. The average worker had to pay $549 a month in premiums for it in 2023.
Medicare provides coverage to about 66 million aged 65+, and costs nearly $175 a month in 2024.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Story here.
There have been nearly 25,000 cases so far this year in Peru, double the 2023 year to date figure.
