just realized this is as good an excuse as any to give some $$$ to the local food pantry because I'm definitely gonna want some charitable write-offs, right? guess I should jump on that!

Lol good memory! Yes, I emptied my 401k, but I got a new roof and a mostly new kitchen out of it, so I have no regrets!

I really do appreciate the heads up tho because I was kinda planning to just spitball both my income taxes AND my property taxes, and now I know I *probably* should put some money aside this winter!

Just my luck mostly, I think? I asked her for a ballpark, and all she'd tell me is, "Expect five digits." So yaaaaaay for upward mobility? lol

Yeah, no way they want to do it again.

I mean, I would definitely bet some money that by the time all those angry calls are done in several weeks time, there will be effectively zero Dems who want another go at this when this CR expires.

Oh, I'm not saying it's going to change votes. But I definitely think that the appetite for another shutdown fight will be pretty much completely evaporated by the time it's January. Like, my two friends that work in the Senate have already said that 90+% of their contacts are angry fed workers.

For sure, but I also think there's still going to be some hell to pay for this in the coming months. Like, I really feel like not enough people are actually reading what (non Bluesky) federal workers are saying because our anger truly pales in comparison to how mad they are at Dems atm.

Eh, at this point I'm more of a split-the-baby enthusiast. I think the shutdown brought a lot of upsides, but the maximal length for extracting those was about two weeks, max. One of the major downsides of doing longer is that people actually start convincing themselves the minority will win.

And why was Thune never gonna nuke the filibuster? Because he has learned to play the long game from his mentor Mitch McConnell: they are already planning on being relegated to a minority, and they want it there intact. Everything they did makes total sense from a simple view of self preservation.

"They were gonna cave!" You can only believe this if you completely ignored everything every Republican had said for the last month. The filibuster was amazingly the one thing they weren't gonna listen to Trump on, and the Senate GOP caucus was 100% prepared to stay shutdown til the midterms.

I said this more than once yesterday, but I think waaaaay too many folks mistook the really amazingly positive *political* optics we wrested out of this as proof that we could win a war of attrition. Seems pretty clear at this point there was just never a path to subsidies.

You guys, we never had any material leverage. All we had was an opportunity to make them eat shit, which they gladly did. So, mission accomplished. There were never going to be any policy extractions because we never had any means of actually making them do it.

I'm not. They've got three votes at the most right now, probably a decent chance all they've got is just Alito and Thomas. Everyone who's been saying Kavanaugh and ACB want to revisit it are just pulling that assessment straight out of their asses. They really don't want to do it!

yes to this, and there's also a VERY pronounced lack of sticks for Senate Democrats to wield on one another atm to keep everybody in line.

old enough to remember that Republicans had to order each other to stop holding town halls because they were getting so loudly, violently yelled down by their own constituents for refusing to defend federal workers from DOGE cuts. "defending feds is bad PR!" is just straight up not true!