Weds: Conservatives Mythed It By a Mile

Oh,SNAP!

Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is under fire after announcing Tuesday he is demanding work requirements for "all" social safety net programs as part of his debt ceiling "negotiations" with President Joe Biden.

F0r decades, study after study show that work requirements are not effective for many reasons, including many people on programs such as Medicaid are not physically able to work, while Americans using other programs, like SNAP, often called food stamps, are not able to work for lack of child or elder care. And many Americans accessing social safety net programs are working already.

Speaker McCarthy, without evidence, baselessly disagrees.

"What work requirements actually do is help people get a job," he told reporters. Work requirements do nothing to "help" people get jobs, they simply threaten them with increased hunger, emotional trauma, and disease if they do not.

"Every data point shows that, and it helps people move forward," McCarthy said, which is also false.

McCarthy claims – again, falsely – "the public wants it, both parties want it."

"The idea that they want to put us into a default because they will not work with on that [sic] is ludicrous to me."

Republicans are the ones pushing for a default, not Democrats.

Asked by a reporter if he is "talking about SNAP, which program are you talking about specifically?" the Speaker freely admitted, "Look, we're talking about all the programs."

He then began to repeat his false claims.

"Because it helps people get into a job."

In DeathSentence World, "Never Back Down" Means "Back Down ASAP"



Sometimes Back Down: Key DeSantis allies viewed anti-Trump tweet as a “massive mistake”

The leading pro-DeSantis PAC surprised the political world with a single tweet after Donald Trump’s CNN town hall last week. It bluntly called out the former president for his answers on January 6th, his “rigged” election claims, “the sex abuse case” he was found liable for damages over, “his defense of his comments about grabbing women by their genitals,” and investigations into “his stash of taxpayer-owned classified documents.”

“How does this Make America Great Again?” the tweet from the official account of Never Back Down concluded.

This was the kind of all-out critique of Trump that Ron DeSantis — and most of the 2024 field — have never made themselves.

Don’t expect to hear it again, though: The tweet generated some heated internal pushback at Never Back Down, while multiple prominent conservative commentators piled on publicly.

One DeSantis ally familiar with their thinking told Semafor that the group’s leadership “100%” recognized it as an error. A second source familiar with the situation added that they were told the tweet was sent without the approval of the PAC’s senior communications team.

Conservatives Mythed It By a Mile

A 2010 op-ed from Michael Saltsman of the Employment Policy Institute provides a characteristic rendition of the argument. Saltsman warned that if state legislatures raised the minimum wage for fast food workers, “The BurgerTron 3000” would soon take their jobs ...

In “High Minimum Wages and the Monopsony Puzzle,” a team of economists at the University of California, Berkeley examined 47 large U.S. counties where the minimum wage had reached $15 an hour by the first quarter of 2021, and compared their wage levels and employment figures to those of similar counties that hadn’t raised the minimum wage since 2009. They focused specifically on fast-food workers, so as to avoid the complexities introduced by the tipped-wages common among servers at more upscale restaurants.

Their results will shock Saltsman and his ideological sympathizers. First, raising the minimum wage successfully increased hourly pay for workers in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution without reducing wages for those in the middle. Had New York and California failed to pass minimum wage increases, this narrowing of the gap between the bottom and middle rungs of the income ladder would not have occurred. Second, the implications for employment were very slightly positive: Counties that enacted minimum wages saw more job growth, not less.

A Rare Sighting of a Florida Democrat Winning an Election

Florida Democrats scored a huge pickup on Tuesday when former TV anchor Donna Deegan won the officially nonpartisan race for mayor of Jacksonville by defeating her Republican foe, Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce head Daniel Davis, 52-48. Deegan's win in the race to succeed termed-out GOP Mayor Lenny Curry will make her the first woman to lead the state’s most populous city and just the second Democrat to hold this office since the early 1990s.

Deegan overcame a serious financial advantage enjoyed by Davis, who aired ads attacking her for attending Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, to give her party a much-needed victory months after its statewide drubbing. She also ends Jacksonville’s status as the largest city in America with a Republican mayor, a title that now goes to Fort Worth, Texas, where incumbent Mattie Price easily won a second term earlier this month.

Jacksonville, which was consolidated with the rest of Duval County in 1968, was for decades a conservative stronghold in both state and local politics. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory began a Republican winning streak that would continue well into the 21st century, while Mayor Ed Austin’s 1993 party switch gave the GOP control of city hall for the first time in a century.



Colorado Springs is a very red city in a blue/purple state. I can’t remember the last time there was a “Democratic” mayor — though municipal elections are supposed to be nonpartisan. Anyone who has lived in El Paso County knows it is very Republican and people rise through the ranks in whichever party they are part of. Their stripes don’t change when they decide to run for mayor. It’s been decades...

Mayor John Suthers was term limited (and not that popular.) TWELVE different people ran for mayor in the April election. After Black newcomer Yemi Mobolade and Wayne Williams (very GOP) came in with the highest numbers, a runoff election was called. The next closest candidate had been Sallie Clark, who was also a former long-term (GOP) city official. Yemi was born in Nigeria. His campaign had been made up of thousands of small donations from thousands of people. Both Sallie Clark and Wayne Williams were well-known to have “connections” with developers. Both had received huge donations from these corporations in this election as well as in the past. After Sallie Clark was eliminated, she endorsed Yemi.

What's the Matter With These Parents? They Couldn't Leave an AK-47 Laying Around?

A young child accidentally shot their 1-year-old sibling at a residence near Houston on Tuesday, authorities said.

The pre-schooler, who is about 4 years old, "found an unsecured pistol at home" and used it to shoot the toddler, according to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzales.

He said in social media posts shared Tuesday evening that the toddler sustained injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening, and had been taken to a hospital for treatment.

The toddler was apparently shot in the leg, CBS affiliate KHOU reported. Citing comments from deputies at the Harris County Sheriff's Office, the station said later on Tuesday night that the toddler had undergone surgery at the hospital and was recovering. The toddler is expected to be okay, the station reported.

As of May 6, there were at least 113 unintentional shootings by children in the U.S., resulting in 47 deaths and 68 injuries nationwide, according to the nonprofit organization Everytown for Gun Safety. In 2022, the organization tracked at least 354 unintentional shootings by children, which resulted in 157 deaths and 212 injuries. Those numbers were down from the year before, when 167 people were killed and another 248 were injured in at least 396 accidental shootings where a child fired the gun, according to the nonprofit.