Open Thread | This Never Ending Cycle Is Tiresome

Posted on March 27, 2026 by rikyrah

I’m so sick of this cycle. Their money gets in trouble, so they’ll vote for Democrats to clean that up. But, as soon as they do, here they vote for some sort of culture wars nonsense to justify voting for Republicans.

Jasmine
‪@jasminerobinson90.bsky.social‬

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Never-ending Cycle of Stupidity
Since 1992, every Democratic POTUS came into office with a trifecta, passed significant legislation & cleaned up their GOP predecessor’s mess only to lose the House, Senate, or both in the midterms & have the country elect another Republican when their term ends.
1️⃣/5️⃣
11:26 PM · Mar 15, 2026

‪Jasmine‬
‪@jasminerobinson90.bsky.social‬
· 12h
Clinton was the only president to balance the budget & leave office with a surplus, but despite the booming economy, HW’s dumbest son won the presidency & turned the surplus into a recession almost as bad as 1929 & started 2 wars, 1 of which was based on lies about non-existent WMDs.
2️⃣/5️⃣

‪Jasmine‬
‪@jasminerobinson90.bsky.social‬
· 12h
Obama turned the economy around, lowered unemployment from 10% to 5% & passed the ACA & the electorate rewarded the Democrats by handing the GOP the House, majorities in numerous state legislatures & the Senate in 2014, which prevented Obama from filling the vacancy left on the SCOTUS by Scalia.
3️⃣/5️⃣

Jasmine‬
‪@jasminerobinson90.bsky.social‬
· 12h
Trump’s 1st presidency was the worst in history until now & although Biden came into office with what was barely a trifecta & a diverse caucus in the 50-50 Senate, the 117th Congress was the most productive in years, yet the GOP flipped the House in the 2022 midterms & won a trifecta in 2024.
4️⃣/5️⃣

‪Jasmine‬
‪@jasminerobinson90.bsky.social‬
· 12h
Every election, whether presidential, midterm, off-year, or special are important & the 4 Democratic senators in AZ & GA show that it’s possible to turn red states purple with good candidates & high turnout.
The only way we’ll get out of this cycle is by voting in large numbers every election.
5️⃣/5️⃣
https://bsky.app/profile/jasminerobinson90.bsky.social/post/3mh5ml2qit22y

Posted in Democratic Party, GOP, Open Thread, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

Open Thread | Financial Indicators

Posted on March 25, 2026 by rikyrah

The Kobeissi Letter
@KobeissiLetter
Absolutely incredible:

The US 20Y Note Yield is now above 5.00%.

At the current pace, we will have 7% mortgages and $4.00 gas prices this week.

Talk about a turn of events.
https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2036026417981325690?s=20

Gandalv
@Microinteracti1
The 20-year Treasury yield just punched through 5%.

That’s the bond market telling you something the White House press office won’t: the trade war tariff and Iran chaos is starting to look a lot like a self-inflicted credit event. Foreign holders are selling US Treasuries. Yields spike when prices fall. Basic stuff. Painful stuff.

The downstream math writes itself. 7% mortgages. $4 gas.

Here’s the part that should make you spit out your coffee: this isn’t happening because the economy is roaring. It’s happening because the world is quietly, methodically, repricing the risk of holding American debt. That’s a very different animal.

The adults used to be in the room. The room is now on fire and someone is arguing about the drapes.
Talk about a turn of events.

Gandalv /
@Microinteracti1
https://x.com/Microinteracti1/status/2036035455611769304?s=20

Posted in Economy, Open Thread, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Open Thread | Just A Reminder About The SAVE ACT

Posted on March 23, 2026 by rikyrah

While the true honest voter suppression wrapped up in Voter ID requirements is real…

The true goal of THE SAVE ACT

Is to fundamentally alter our Election system.

Our Election System, by design in the Constitution, was one based on a DE-CENTRALIZED system, with elections being run and controlled by THE STATES.

The SAVE ACT would FEDERALIZE OUR ELECTION SYSTEMS

The Voter ID portion is the nice shiny object that’s simple to try and sell, as the GOP is lying about it.

Explaining the ramifications of a FEDERAL TAKEOVER of Elections, is complicated, and would actually mean that the MSM would have to do some actual work.

But, that’s what the GOP is attempting to do. FEDERALIZE our elections, and make State Election Boards nothing more than rubberstamps.

Yes, it’s true, that the Voter ID portion has the potential to disenfranchise MILLIONS of voters. But, taking control of Elections on a FEDERAL level is the end goal of the GOP.

And, but, another reason to pick up the phone and tell your Senator to VOTE NO.

Continue reading →

Posted in 2026 Elections, Open Thread, Politics, SAVE ACT, Voter Suppression | Tagged , , , , , , | 22 Comments

Weekend Open Thread

Posted on March 21, 2026 by rikyrah

Good Morning. I hope that you are enjoying this weekend, fully vaccinated and boosted, with family and friends. That new booster shot has been approved..be sure to get it. Call and see if your pharmacy has it.

Order your free COVID Tests., if you still can.

Sinners performance at the Oscars

Posted in Weekend Open Thread | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Open Thread | When They Tell You Who They Are…Believe Them

Posted on March 20, 2026 by rikyrah

UH HUH
UH HUH

BlackskyNews 🗞️
‪@blackskynews.blacksky.app‬

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“Palantir CEO Alex Karp thinks his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men.”
newrepublic.com/post/207693/…

BlackskyNews 🗞️
‪@blackskynews.blacksky.app‬

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“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters,” Karp said in a CNBC interview Thursday.
5:00 PM · Mar 12, 2026

BlackskyNews 🗞️
‪@blackskynews.blacksky.app‬

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“And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society. And to make this work, we have to come to an agreement of what it is we’re going to do with the technology; how are we gonna explain to people who are likely gonna have less good, and less interesting jobs.”
5:00 PM · Mar 12, 2026

BlackskyNews 🗞️
‪@blackskynews.blacksky.app‬

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This sounds like a direct, long-term pitch to the GOP from a CEO whose tech firm already has numerous government contracts and is deeply embedded in the Pentagon. Karp’s message is loud and clear: My technology will take political capital away from one of your greatest enemies —
5:00 PM · Mar 12, 2026

BlackskyNews 🗞️
‪@blackskynews.blacksky.app‬

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liberal women with degrees—and give one of your favorite demographics to patronize—working-class men—more political power to transfer to you. He’s aligning his technology with both GOP political strategy and the larger male-centered culture war that the right has been waging for the better part of a
5:00 PM · Mar 12, 2026

Continue reading →

Posted in AI, Open Thread, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

Open Thread | This Is Absolutely Outrageous…Being Homeless IS NOT a CRIME…

Posted on March 18, 2026 by rikyrah

Get THEE ENTIRE PHUCK OUTTA HERE!

Anything, but expanding programs that would actually help the homeless.

V.A. Begins Drive to Put Some Homeless Veterans Into Guardianship
The Trump administration will expand the power of government attorneys to initiate court proceedings for veterans “unable to make their own health care decisions.”
By Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle
March 11, 2026

The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a new effort to initiate legal guardianships for hundreds of veterans, including some who are homeless or “at risk of homelessness,” that could be used to force more of them into involuntary or institutional care.

Under the new arrangement, the Justice Department would give officials at the Veterans Affairs Department authority they currently lack to initiate guardianship proceedings in state courts for veterans who have no family and are “unable to make their own health care decisions.”

If a state court determines that a veteran is incapable of making health care decisions, it would appoint a third-party guardian not employed by the V.A., who would be charged to act in the veterans’ best interests, said Pete Kasperowicz, the V.A. press secretary.

The initiative comes amid a push by the Trump administration to compel more homeless people into institutional treatment for mental illness and drug addiction.

President Trump identified homelessness as a priority during the 2024 presidential campaign and promoted it last July in an executive order that called on agencies to use civil commitment to move homeless people into “long-term institutional settings.”

Critics say the policy shift raises significant civil liberties concerns, noting that in earlier generations, people with severe mental illness were routinely stripped of their legal rights and confined to state hospitals.

Continue reading →

Posted in Homeless Veterans, Open Thread, Politics | Tagged , , , | 18 Comments

Open Thread | This Iran War Is Changing Things Rapidly, in Ways Unseen Just Weeks Ago

Posted on March 16, 2026 by rikyrah

Didn’t see this coming when this all began.

Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡
@shanaka86
BREAKING: Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, is negotiating to buy drone interceptors from Ukraine, the country Russia has been bombing for four years, to defend its oil fields from Iran, the country America has been bombing for two weeks.

Read that sentence as many times as you need. It is the 21st century in a single transaction.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a Saudi intermediary closely tied to Aramco is in advanced talks with Ukrainian manufacturers SkyFall and Wild Hornets for their P1-SUN and STING interceptor drones, plus Phantom Defense electronic warfare systems, in a multi-million-dollar batch purchase explicitly designed to destroy Iranian Shahed-type drones before they reach Saudi oil infrastructure.

Ukraine learned to kill Shaheds by being hit with them. Russia has launched thousands of Iranian-made Shaheds at Ukrainian cities, power stations, and military positions since 2022. Ukrainian engineers did not study the Shahed in a laboratory. They studied it falling through their bedroom ceilings. They reverse-engineered the threat, built interceptors calibrated to its exact flight profile, radar signature, and thermal characteristics, and fielded them under fire. The interceptors work because the engineers who built them did so while the drones they were designed to kill were attacking their homes.

Now Saudi Arabia wants to buy that knowledge. Not from Lockheed. Not from Raytheon. Not from the Patriot system that costs $3 million per missile and was designed to kill ballistic warheads, not $20,000 drones. From Ukrainian startups that built their products in basements and tested them on battlefields.

The strategic implications cascade across every domain this war touches.

For Ukraine, this is the moment the country transforms from victim to vendor. Zelensky’s government has spent four years asking the world for weapons. It is now selling them. Every interceptor drone that ships to Saudi Arabia funds Ukraine’s own defence, reduces Kyiv’s dependence on Western aid, and demonstrates that the country the world pitied has become the world’s most experienced counter-drone power. The “salesman of the year” meme circulating on X understates it. Ukraine is not selling products. It is selling survival expertise, and the market for survival expertise in a world of $20,000 drones is every country with infrastructure worth protecting.

For Saudi Arabia, this is an admission that the most expensive Western air defence systems in the world cannot efficiently kill the cheapest weapons in the world. The Kingdom operates Patriot batteries, THAAD interceptors, and an integrated air defence architecture that costs tens of billions. Against ballistic missiles, these systems perform. Against saturation swarms of $20,000 Shaheds, they are economically irrational: a $3 million Patriot missile destroying a $20,000 drone is a 150-to-1 cost inversion that the attacker wins by firing. Ukraine’s interceptors cost a fraction of Western missiles and are purpose-built for exactly the threat Iran is deploying. Aramco is not buying Ukrainian because it is fashionable. It is buying Ukrainian because the math demands it.

Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Economy, Open Thread, Politics, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Weapons Systems | Tagged , , , , , , , | 41 Comments

Weekend Open Thread

Posted on March 14, 2026 by rikyrah

Good Morning. I hope that you are enjoying this weekend, fully vaccinated and boosted, with family and friends. That new booster shot has been approved..be sure to get it. Call and see if your pharmacy has it.

Order your free COVID Tests., if you still can.

About that Target boycott “ending”😒😒😒

Posted in Weekend Open Thread | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Open Thread | Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job

Posted on March 13, 2026 by rikyrah

The complete rage I feel while reading this.

Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job
The Social Security inspector general’s office is investigating allegations that the former DOGE engineer took sensitive data on a thumb drive in a major potential security breach, said people familiar with the process.

March 10, 2026 at 10:47 p.m. EDT
By Meryl Kornfield, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Lisa Rein

The Social Security Administration’s internal watchdog is investigating a complaint that alleges a former U.S. DOGE Service employee claimed he had access to two highly sensitive agency databases and planned to share the information with his private employer — a claim that, if true, would constitute an unprecedented breach of security protocols at an agency that serves more than 70 million Americans.

The agency’s inspector general is investigating the disclosure and has alerted members of Congress of its existence, according to a letter by the acting inspector general to top members of four congressional committees reviewed by The Washington Post and two people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive deliberations. The inspector general’s office has also shared the disclosure with the Government Accountability Office, which has been conducting its own audit of DOGE’s access to data, according to one of the people. The Post has reviewed the complaint and spoken with the whistleblower, who issued the complaint anonymously for fear of retaliation.

According to the disclosure, the former DOGE software engineer, who worked at the Social Security Administration last year before starting a job at a government contractor in October, allegedly told several co-workers that he possessed two tightly restricted databases of U.S. citizens’ information, and had at least one on a thumb drive. The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names. The complaint does not include specific dates of when he is said to have told colleagues this information, but at least one of the alleged events unfolded around early January, according to the complaint. While working at DOGE, the engineer had approved access to Social Security data.

According to the complaint, he allegedly told the whistleblower that he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company.]” The engineer told colleagues that once he had removed personal details from the data, he wanted to upload it into the company’s systems. He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.

Posted in DOGE, Open Thread, Politics, Social Security Administration | Tagged , , , , , , | 20 Comments

Open Thread | Checking In With the Attacks On Women’s Autonomy

Posted on March 11, 2026 by rikyrah

Ms. Valenti continues to be my go-to source as I want to keep up with the continued attacks on women’s body autonomy across the country.

Republicans Want to Change the Definition of Abortion
Jessica Valenti and Kylie Cheung
Mar 04, 2026

Tennessee GOP Using AI Bill to Codify Fetal Personhood
This is wild: Rachel Wells at TN Repro News flags that Tennessee Republicans have introduced a bill (HB 0849) that would redefine personhood as beginning at fertilization—and they’re doing it through an AI regulation bill.

Fetal personhood is already written into Tennessee abortion regulations and criminal code, but as Wells points out, this legislation would establish personhood in the state’s Title 1 definitions. “That means, if passed, this phrase could be used as a legal framework throughout the Tennessee code,” she writes.

They really are coming up with some new nonsense every day.

Republicans Want to Change the Definition of Abortion
While we’re on the topic of Republicans futzing with language, let’s talk about the latest legislative trend: anti-abortion lawmakers in multiple states are trying to change the definition of ‘abortion’.

Longtime readers know that I’ve spent years tracking this tactic: in 2023, I warned in The New York Times that anti-abortion legislators and activists were increasingly claiming that women didn’t need life-saving abortions because they could have “maternal fetal separations” instead (aka c-sections and forced delivery). And in 2024, I laid out the goal: to divorce abortion from healthcare entirely and eliminate exceptions for women’s lives.

Conservatives Want to End ‘Exceptions’ for Women’s Lives
Jessica Valenti

Now, Republicans are ramping up those efforts.

Utah lawmakers, for example, want medical records to distinguish between “elective” and “medically indicated” abortions. Under HB 480, patients who miscarry, face ectopic pregnancies or fatal fetal abnormalities, need life- or health-saving abortions—or are pregnant after rape—could have their medical records formally changed to note they had a good abortion. Not like those other bad women who wanted their pregnancy to end.

A sign that the bill is part of a coordinated national strategy? Utah isn’t alone. A pre-filed Louisiana bill would do much the same thing: HB 288 mandates that when doctors code pregnancy loss as “spontaneous abortion”—which is standard medical language—that they add a parenthetical that says “miscarriage.”

Meanwhile, the South Dakota Senate just passed HB 1257, which would change the definition of abortion to exclude treatment for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and “any medical procedure performed for the purpose of saving the life or preserving the health of the unborn child.” (aka, c-sections.)

South Dakota lawmakers say they’re just trying to “clarify” the state’s abortion ban because pro-choicers have scared doctors out of providing legal care. That, of course, is the same excuse anti-abortion legislators and activists have used across the country to pass other so-called “clarifications”—bills that actually further restrict women’s rights. (See: Kentucky)

The ACLU of South Dakota points out, for example, that HB 1257 defines an “unborn child” from fertilization, which “could create a legal domino effect that triggers broader restrictions on hormonal contraception, emergency contraception and in vitro fertilization.”

All of which is to say, these bills are not being introduced to help women! The goal is to eliminate all abortion—even to save women’s lives—and to attack any bit of freedom we have.

Posted in Abortion, Abortion Rights, Healthcare, Open Thread, Politics | Tagged , , , , | 18 Comments