Netizen: 31: Palantir

Friday, October 31, 2025

31: Palantir

The Banyan Revolt (novel)
Gen Z Kranti (novel)
Madhya York: The Merchant and the Mystic (novel)
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Poetry Thursdays (novel)

Too Cruel Too Soon How Republicans messed up on Project 2025 .......... Federal funding for SNAP, the nutritional aid program still often referred to as food stamps, ends tonight. This will have catastrophic impacts on 42 million Americans, the great majority of them children, elderly or disabled. ........... Millions more Americans are about to discover that health insurance has become vastly more expensive, in many cases unaffordable. ............ Drastic cuts in food stamps and health care programs were central planks in Project 2025, which is indeed the Trump administration’s policy platform, and were written into legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed last summer. ............

But the consequences of these cruel intentions weren’t supposed to be this obvious, this early. The harshest provisions of the OBBBA were backloaded, set to kick in after the midterm elections.

............ the mask is being ripped off right now, well ahead of schedule. ............ it’s possible that Republicans will manage to limit the political damage by claiming — completely falsely — that the suffering about to hit millions is being caused by Democrats who want to lavish benefits on illegal immigrants and pay for sex change operations. ............ In the past it would have been unthinkable to display political propaganda, let alone grotesquely dishonest propaganda, on government data sites. But we’re in a new world. ............. So what went wrong? I’d attribute it to a combination of policy ignorance, visceral hatred of doing anything that helps people in need, and the Epstein files. (Seriously.) ............... The out of pocket cost of health insurance for 2026 is soaring — 114 percent on average .......... senior Republicans in Congress and their advisors just don’t understand how the Affordable Care Act works, and never have. ........... it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his membership in a political cult depends on his not understanding it. ............ the Democrats have chosen to make their stand over health care, and polling suggests that they have chosen very good ground. .............. The government shutdown, in turn, has led to a cutoff of funds for SNAP. So the premature outbreaks of cruelty are all connected. .............. The refusal to release SNAP contingency funds could reflect a deeply cynical political calculation — Democrats care when people go hungry, we don’t, so let’s use SNAP recipients as hostages. But I doubt that it’s that calculated. Instead, it reflects a visceral dislike for doing anything that helps people in need. ............... there’s a further problem. Passing either a SNAP bill or a revised budget would require calling the House of Representatives back into session, which would in turn make it impossible for Mike Johnson, the speaker, to keep stalling the swearing-in of Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election more than 5 weeks ago. And here’s the thing: Once sworn in, Grijalva would provide the decisive signature to trigger a vote in the House to release the Epstein files. ................... The idea that Johnson’s unprecedented refusal to swear in a duly elected member of Congress reflects his determination to protect pedophiles sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s looking more and more like the only coherent explanation of his actions. And if he believes that the House must be kept closed to maintain his stonewalling, that prevents any resolution of the nutrition and health care crises. ......... In any case, the political strategy behind Republicans’ policy agenda appears to have gone completely off the rails. The plan was to mask the true harshness of this agenda by delaying much of its cruelty, with the worst effects not hitting until after the midterms. Instead, severe nutrition and health care crises are happening right now. And I have no idea how they’ll be resolved.