Use Your Blinker

The posted shall be amusing, interesting, and irreverent. Respect the funny.

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Palazzo da Mula at Venice, 1908, Claude Monet

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Senate rejects yet another GOP push to revive SAVE America Act

The failed vote is another major setback for President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans, who have repeatedly tried to revive the SAVE Ame

Yunior Rivas at Democracy Docket:

The Senate blocked another Republican attempt Thursday to attach the anti-voting SAVE America Act to an immigration funding package, marking the second failed GOP effort to move the sweeping voting restrictions bill through the chamber. The amendment, offered by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), failed in a 48-50 vote. The vote showed Republicans didn’t even have a simple majority for the proposal, even before reaching the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome procedural objections. Four Senate Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — joined every Democrat to block the amendment. The proposal needed 60 votes because Republicans were trying to attach it to a nearly $70 billion budget reconciliation package funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol. Reconciliation can bypass the filibuster, but only for provisions with a clear budget impact — which is why Republicans have been looking for ways to attach voting restrictions to spending measures.

The failed vote is another major setback for President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans, who have repeatedly tried to revive the SAVE America Act despite unified Democratic opposition and resistance from some members of their own party. The legislation would impose new national voting restrictions, including ID and citizenship documentation requirements. Voting rights advocates have warned that those requirements could disenfranchise eligible voters who don’t have easy access to qualifying documents.

[...] The defeat came the same day U.S. Rep. Julie Fedorchak (R-N.D.) introduced a separate REAL ID bill that could give Republicans another path to advance parts of the SAVE America agenda through reconciliation. That bill would create a federal grant program to help states provide REAL ID-compliant cards to low-income residents — giving Republicans a clearer budget hook as they look for ways around the filibuster.

The Republican bid to jam the SAVE America Act through failed again in the Senate.

See Also:

NPR: Republicans' sweeping election overhaul fails in the Senate

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Researchers found that roundhead parrotfish can spend up to an hour making this cocoon before sleep. In one study, fish with intact cocoons had far fewer parasite bites than fish whose cocoons were removed. Scientists think the cocoon may block parasites physically, chemically, or by hiding the fish’s smell.

[weantuniverse]

LifebyMitchell, John Ames, 1845-1918 Publication date1883TopicsAmerican wit and humor, Pictorial, American wit and humor, American wit and humor, American wit and humor, PictorialPublisherNew York, N.Y. : Life

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Senate Republicans Drop Ballroom Funding From Immigration Bill

President Donald Trump needs a court to bail out his ballroom project if Congress won't do it.

Arthur Delaney at HuffPost:

Senate Republicans have officially ditched an effort to fund President Donald Trump’s ballroom at the White House. The fate of Trump’s gilded dining hall is now in legal limbo with likely no help coming from Capitol Hill. Money for the Secret Service and the “East Wing Modernization Project” was omitted from a new version of Republicans’ bill Republicans announced Wednesday to fund immigration enforcement operations at the Department of Homeland Security. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) suggested there’s not much appetite for bringing the ballroom funding back. “It’s not in here,” Thune told HuffPost, referring to the new bill. “I suspect if there’s something that people want to see get done there, they’d probably go through the appropriations process.”

There’s little chance Trump is getting ballroom money through the appropriations process, which is the normal way Congress writes bills funding government agencies. Regular appropriations bills require 60 votes to clear the Senate, and Republicans control just 53 seats, meaning they’d need at least seven Democrats to go along with a wildly unpopular Trump vanity project. Not much chance of that.

“Thanks to the outrage of the American people and hard-fought challenges by Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans finally gave up on funding Trump’s billionaire ballroom for now,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Wednesday. The ballroom billion had previously been included in an immigration bill going through a special “budget reconciliation” process that only takes 50 votes. The Senate parliamentarian said the provision couldn’t stay in the bill under the special budget rules. Republicans started reworking the provision last month, but then gave up and left town in a furor over Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday the slush fund is dead, prompting Senate Republicans to breathe a sigh of relief and get back on their immigration bill ― with no provisions addressing the slush fund, which some Republicans wanted to do, and no ballroom.

Senate Republicans nix the wildly unpopular White House Ballroom funding from their bill.

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Gerardo Feldstein was born in Buenos Aires in 1958.

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[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

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