Top negotiators for Biden and Speaker McCarthy resumed talks Friday evening after the Republicans said the negotiations had to go on a “pause”. Roll Call reports that:
“After a nearly daylong setback, White House Counselor Steve Ricchetti, White House budget director Shalanda Young, Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., and House Financial Services Chairman Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C., resumed talks at the Capitol shortly after 6 p.m.”
Time is running out for Congress to raise the debt ceiling. If not, the consequences are stark. Keeping the lines of communication open and giving away the store are two different things entirely. On to cartoons.
McCarthy’s toll booth:
The North Carolina legislature overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s veto  of a bill imposing a ten-week abortion ban. Will this ensure Democratic victory in North Carolina in 2024?
Texas has sued the Biden administration 29 times in a Texas Federal District Court. Now after banning mifepristone, Texas judges have new careers:
Durham’s report:
Disney’s Bob Iger asks DeSantis: “Does Florida want our jobs and taxes or not?” This is a severe kick in the balls:
Wrongo’s old enough to have seen Jim Brown play in Yankee Stadium against the NY Giants:
Trump’s one note:
The fact of a court overseeing the approval of any medication is so bizarre. Even it approval were flawed, the next step would not be to take it off the market but to examine the current safety record. Medications are continually monitored for safety and while most are never withdrawn, some have their safety instructions amended. And some are pulled back. Or – as in the case of theophylline (used for asthma) are pulled back from being over the counter to be prescription only. And of course, the list of OTC meds is continually enlarged.
Even the existence of side effects is not a reason to pull back a medication – as is going on with abortion drugs. There are side effects from nearly all medications. I know a woman who took NSAIDS (the class includes alleve and so on) and ended up with tinnitus. The same class can lead to gastric problems including bleeding. And tylenol is very toxic to the liver – in large and sustained doses (so chronic headache sufferers beware).
And of course all the new biologics (names ending in mab and nib)…. the side effects are scary – but so are the diseases (including metastatic breast cancer).
But the rights has never fully accepted even the new deal and since it is easier to destroy than to build, well they continue to want to return America to the land it was before FDR.
Few people now alive were out of grade school in the days before FDR. But we should know our American history well enough to know that lots of Americans (even the upperclass ones), died from infected workplace wounds, from commonplace childhood diseases and from abortions attempted at home. Millions were lawfully denied the vote. Many horrific crimes against certain citizens were not investigated, let alone punished. Thousands of workers were severely injured or killed in dangerous, but wholly unregulated, workplaces. Hundreds of thousands more lived in dwellings squalid beyond present day imagination, let alone experience.
So what was good about “the good old days”? Most people “knew their place.” Their (avowed and outwardly lived) gender identity, what was the “American” religion, where each ethnic or racial group should live, what books nice people should tolerate, where mentally ill persons should be housed, etc. “The simple life”