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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 9:09:59 GMT -8
Dear Abby,
I have a man I can't trust. He cheats so much, I'm not even sure the baby I'm carrying is his.
Dear Abby,
I am a twenty-three year old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It's getting expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don't know him well enough to discuss money with him.
Who's on First, What's on Second, I Don't Know is Fighting in Soledar
Russia's defence ministry says its forces are taking part in the battle for Soledar, a town north of Bakhmut in east Ukraine which has been the focus of recent fighting.
It comes after the head of Russia's notoriously brutal Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed his fighters were in full control there and boasted that only his troops took part.
Mr Prigozhin will most likely use any victory to bolster the reputation of Wagner as an effective fighting force in the eyes of President Putin.
But the Russian defence ministry appeared to contradict the controversial oligarch's claims.
Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in the military's daily update that: "Soledar has been blockaded from the north and the south by units of the Russian Airborne Forces.
"The Russian Air Force is carrying out strikes on enemy strongholds. Assault troops are taking part in battles inside the town." There was no mention of Wagner forces.
Ukraine's defence ministry also said on Wednesday that heavy fighting continues, and Wagner forces have had no success in breaking through its defences.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 9:12:22 GMT -8
Who Cares About Soledar?
To analysts, if Moscow is able to capture Soledar, a tiny salt-mining town in Ukraine’s war-scarred southeast, the “victory” would be little more than a consolation prize for Russia’s failing military effort.
To the Kremlin and pro-Moscow separatists, though, taking the town with a pre-war population near 10,000 would be a groundbreaking triumph.
And to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, a private army, Soledar offers access to mineral riches, a stash of firearms and a higher place in the Kremlin’s pecking order.
Prigozhin is known as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “chef” after becoming rich from government contracts to feed soldiers, schoolchildren and guests at state banquets.
For months, he has been trying to seize the nearby city of Bakhmut – an important logistical hub whose takeover would allow Russian and separatist forces to advance deep into southeastern Ukraine.
Despite countless attacks, shelling and a reported loss of thousands of soldiers, including fighters who were recruited from Russian jails, freshly mobilised reservists and forcibly conscripted men from separatist-held Ukrainian areas, the Wagner Group has failed to decisively take Bakhmut.
This setback is especially humiliating after a months-long series of Russian defeats and retreats in eastern and southern Ukraine that have highlighted what some observers view as disorganised, badly coordinated and poorly motivated Russian forces.
So Moscow needs a victory – if not a strategic one, then at least something that can be trumpeted on Kremlin-controlled television networks and reported to Putin.
“There is a propaganda viewpoint – if Bakhmut [can’t be taken], then they need to show at least something because Prigozhin promised it to Putin,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera.
No, Who's on First.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 9:17:14 GMT -8
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Turn to Face the Strange
The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t win legislative victories. It’s that legislative victories can’t answer the party’s underlying discontent, which is less about government policy than about American culture. Democrats worry about voting rights, gun control, climate change and abortion — enormous challenges, but ones that congressional leaders can at least try to address. What Republicans fear, above all, is social and demographic changes that leave white Christian men feeling disempowered, a complex set of forces that Republicans often lump together as “wokeness.”
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 9:18:02 GMT -8
Who's Running Things?
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 9:24:14 GMT -8
Is This the the Worst Bill Ever?
A bill to abolish the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), eliminate the tax code, replace income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate and gift taxes with a 23% national sales tax is going to the floor.
By the way, it doesn’t just abolish the IRS, though that’s the only thing spelled out in the text. It threatens Social Security and Medicare, which run on payroll taxes. The bill would allocate the proceeds from the sales tax to “(1) the general revenue, (2) the old-age and survivors insurance trust fund, (3) the disability insurance trust fund, (4) the hospital insurance trust fund, and (5) the federal supplementary medical insurance trust fund,” but ends the dedicated funding source for the programs in the future. When all the functions of government are coming from one pot of money and social insurance programs have to compete with defense for money, guess what gets sacrificed?
It also means a big regressive tax hike on low- and middle- income families, as President Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain tweeted. “New GOP plan: eliminate income tax on the rich, giant national sales tax on all middle class families.” It has a “monthly tax rebate” that’s supposed to go back to people “based upon criteria related to family size and poverty guidelines,” but there won’t be any IRS to figure out how to get that money back to people, so it puts the onus onto the states to administer. That would be an “unfunded mandate” in conservative speak.
Also, no tax code means no deductions for donations to charity, which means lots of nonprofits disappear. Which means a great deal of assistance to the nation’s most vulnerable people disappears. But of course there are plenty of protections for rich people to get out of even paying this tax: “exemptions from the tax for used and intangible property; for property or services purchased for business, export, or investment purposes; and for state government functions.”
The wackiest part? It includes a time bomb that sets the nation up to have zero revenue in 2030. Zero dollars going to federal coffers, with this provision: “the bill terminates the national sales tax if the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (authorizing an income tax) is not repealed within seven years after the enactment of this bill.” No permanent repeal of the income tax, no tax at all.
And it’s getting a floor vote. Because of Kevin McCarthy’s desperate need to be called speaker. Because the GOP of 2023 has no clue how any of this works.
The bill, if it passes in the House, will get laughed out of the Senate and has no hope of passing. Which makes it a poison pill for the not-maniacs in the House GOP. One of the other reasons it’s never advanced to the floor is that leadership never wanted to force their members to have to vote on something so ridiculous, a vote that could either alienate the core Tea Party base on the one hand or their corporate funders on the other. Business does not like this idea.
So thanks Kevin for yet another gift to Democrats in 2024.
Worse Than Bill O'Reilly,
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 9:25:26 GMT -8
But Wait! There's More!
House Republicans are set to vote on a pair of abortion bills this week, just a few months after their disappointing performance in the 2022 midterm elections that even some top Republicans like former President Donald Trump attributed to extreme abortion policies.
Both proposals are likely to pass in the GOP-controlled House but die in the Senate. The futile attempt to pass anti-abortion legislation comes on the heels of a letter sent to Republicans in the House from dozens of conservative and religious groups. The letter includes a list of anti-choice demands such as passing a law to protect infants born alive during an abortion and a national ban after six weeks.
It also follows last year’s Supreme Court decision repealing federal abortion rights, which played a huge role in boosting Democratic turnout in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans who confidently predicted a “red wave” all year long were stunned in November when they failed to win the Senate and only win an extremely small majority in the House.
Trump himself blamed the GOP’s midterm losses partly on Republicans’ handling of the abortion issue, singling out those who backed no exceptions to bans on the procedure, including in instances of rape and incest. (The former president did so without mentioning the fact that many of the candidates he endorsed did this very thing).
The decision to hold votes on abortion legislation in the first week of the GOP’s new House majority, despite the bruising election losses, was too much for one Republican congresswoman, who has been particularly outspoken about the issue.
“We learned nothing from the midterms if this is how we’re going to operate in the first week. Millions of women across the board were angry over overturning Roe v. Wade,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) told reporters on Tuesday. “What we’re doing this week is paying lip service to life. Nothing that we’re doing this week on protecting life is ever going to make it through the Senate.”
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 9:26:45 GMT -8
The QOP Keeps Losing
Democrats appear to have flipped a critical Senate seat in the Virginia legislature on Tuesday — likely safeguarding the state from enacting a 15-week abortion ban.
Aaron Rouse, a former NFL player and Virginia Beach councilmember, holds a narrow lead over Republican Kevin Adams, a Navy veteran, as of Wednesday morning. The special election was held to fill a swing-district seat vacated by Republican Jen Kiggans after she was elected to the U.S. House in November.
It was a tight race, with Rouse taking 50.41% of the votes and Adams 49.51%, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Rouse currently leads Adams by just 348 votes. Although Virginia Public Access Project called the race for Rouse ― and Rouse and Democrats have claimed victory ― absentee ballots are still being counted. As of Wednesday morning, Adams had not conceded.
“THANK YOU! With your support, and the support of voters from across Virginia Beach and Norfolk, we have won this Special Election,” Rouse tweeted on Tuesday night. “No rest for the weary – tomorrow, we head to Richmond to get to work for Virginia families.”
The election attracted big money from both sides of the aisle because its outcome will likely have an outsized impact on the fate of abortion rights in Virginia. Rouse is pro-choice and promised to “fiercely protect the right to an abortion,” while Adams opposes abortion and supported a 15-week ban with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the pregnant person.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) first hinted at the possibility of a 15-week abortion ban in December when he proposed allocating $50,000 to establish such a ban in the state budget. Youngkin, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, initially painted himself as a moderate on abortion rights on the campaign trail in 2021 but quickly changed his tune once in office.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 9:32:19 GMT -8
Which Came First, the Sperm or the Egg?
As some inflation-hiked food costs and supply chain woes have started to fall, eggs are one corner of the supermarket where prices have remained stubbornly high.
Egg prices hit historic peaks ahead of the December holidays, when egg demand is at its highest. But even slight decreases in recent weeks mean shoppers in the United States started the new year facing far higher than average costs. In California, the priciest market, shoppers were shelling out an average of $7.37 for a dozen Grade A large eggs, roughly three times the cost from a year earlier.
The egg industry is dealing with unresolved supply chain challenges kicked off by the coronavirus pandemic — including labor and building costs — as well as a devastating outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) that began in February. The outbreak drove up the price of Thanksgiving turkeys in November, but its impact continues to ripple in the egg industry. According to the Agriculture Department, the flu has wiped out more than 44 million egg-laying hens, or roughly 4 to 5 percent of production.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 11, 2023 10:07:29 GMT -8
Confused About La Niña and El Niño? Aren't We All.
Amid a La Niña year, usually associated with dry and warm weather, California has been displaying elements of El Niño: Big waves, snowcapped mountains, and flooded coastal streets suitable for boards and dinghies.
Some earth scientists have been searching for an answer to explain why the usually opposite-behaving weather phenomena appear to have switched roles, with global warming emerging as one possible factor.
Jin-Yi Yu, a University of California, Irvine, atmospheric scientist, said Tuesday that climate change may have an impact on how long each phenomenon lasts, which in the last 25 years has often been for back-to-back years. This, in turn, might affect how they shape the weather.
"The research community has noticed that the duration of El Niño and La Niña events seems to be elongated so far in the 21st century, which may be a result of global warming," Yu said by email.
La Niña, defined by cooler-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, is in its third consecutive year, although federal researchers believe the phenomena is ending and we're headed for a "neutral" midwinter and spring, where neither La Niña nor El Niño rules the Eastern Pacific.
El Niño is marked by warner-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific that helped encourage those tropically supercharged atmospheric rivers that bring serious precipitation to California, which describes what’s been happening since Sunday.
Yu has been watching it all unfold for years and documented the disappearance of traditional El Niño impacts after its spectacular showing in 1997, when snow fell in urban Southern California and waves were described as historic.
La Niña so far this year looks like the El Niño he used to know.
"This storm pattern in Southern California is not what we typically expect for a La Niña year," Yu said. "It is more like a winter rainfall pattern we would expect in Southern California during an El Niño year."
Yu, who is conducting National Science Foundation-funded research aimed at explaining the changing phenomena, said there may be another culprit: the so-called North Pacific marine heat wave.
"The above-normal sea surface temperatures have been lasting for seasons over the North Pacific, which can alter the pathway of the winter storms and bring more rainfall into Southern California," he said.
There's one other possibility: La Niña will show up in traditional form soon. This is what happened last winter in California, when a wet December showed promise for a drought-ending season but quickly succumbed to La Niña's warmth.
National Weather Service meteorologist Ryan Kittell noted that downtown Los Angeles has received nearly 9 inches of rain since the water year started Oct. 1. But if the rain stops before that period ends Sept. 30, as it did last year, that's a below average total for a season that typically sees an average of 14 inches. That's La Niña.
We Already Have 100% of the Normal Snow in the Sierras For an Entire Winter.
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