I did sorta hope his sleeves were always a little persistently damp when he washes his hands

👇🏼 I thought we talked about this www.the-pom.com/p/childrens-...

Anyway, to the man who theatrically shook his head any time my son moved, breathed, or - distressingly!! - excitedly said “a choo choo!” At Radio City last night, you are one miserable bastard. Maybe don’t go to a matinee show featuring Santa if a 3yo excited to see a train ruins your night.

I think a shutdown can get people’s attention and raise the stakes. And there must also be a strong norm that it needs to stop short of material and irreversible harm.

vote for them and cannot vote them out within a reasonable timeframe, do you think that only one side can do that? Do you think a GOP led shutdown would end nearly so humanely, the party who have shown over and over they are near sociopathic?

God of the Woods!

We both did it with this book!

You cannot use the suffering of Americans as leverage against people who are fundamentally unmoved by suffering

The way people act like we were days away from a massive windfall of concessions and not plunging face first into the longest shutdown in history with basically no one behind the wheel

It’s easy to say that staying the course was the right decision; I’d prefer not to see how low the GOP would go

The individuals impacted did not consent to being bargaining chips. They also cannot withdraw that consent or vote again for a year. This cannot become the main strategy by which politics gets done. It sucks that it failed. I wish it hadn’t.

In addition to the selfish desire for me to be able to feed myself and my family, the other thing that really scared me was the possibility of a major air disaster. I don't care who would've been "blamed" for it. It's a tragedy that I hope we avoided.

Look, it sucks. Our family includes an elder with cancer on Medicare and a government employee. I am terrified for what will become of all of us. I also know that treating the ongoing impact as inconsequential AND asserting that more suffering would guarantee concessions are both false.

Do you really think the only ongoing impact of a shutdown is people traveling for pleasure? Jesus

So many folks believe reality is a script written by Aaron Sorkin where the Dems extract every concession they want and go in to ride it to electoral smash victories with no one harmed in the process?

Where did I say gut the ACA?

So your argument here is that if we reopen the government to provide short term relief on a short-term agreement brokered over health insurance administration … the Dems will 100% lose every subsequent election? That is a wild claim.

Possibly, unfalsifiable tbh, and also the government is shut down. People are working without pay, including in jobs that are critical to public safety. SNAP is also not the entire equation of family hunger. The nation is not built to function without an open government for any amount of time.

What are you talking about? People are working full time jobs without being paid. The GOP controls government. Y’all act like if we stick it out long enough we will get a whole new president. This isn’t Space Jam. It’s a bunch of shitty options.

I don’t really disagree with any of that. Honestly the calculations will always feel like unacceptable compromises. An emergent, ongoing, non theoretical risk of harm should be weighed even higher when all parties are not rational actors. It’s fucking terrible, yeah.

You cannot say “the ongoing cost of this is calculated at zero” - it goes up and it goes up quickly and dramatically over time. And as it does, we can’t act like the calculation doesn’t change.