Hello.

Hello. I girl bossed too close to the sun. But stuff still happened. So what's up? It is day six of the United States government shutdown and there does not appear to be an end in sight. As of now nearly two million federal workers are either working without pay or on unpaid leave. In a couple of weeks we'll see the pay periods for military and federal workers come and go and that will increase the stakes of the shutdown significantly. All the while no actual talks have been happening between the parties Instead, our leadership is currently in a meme war in which the president is tweeting racist memes about the leaders of the Democratic Party. Trump's only attempts to negotiate have been to threaten quote irreversible cuts to federal spending and federal employees. He has also frozen 28 billion dollars in funding that was supposed to go to Democrat run states for things like infrastructure and public transit. He says he's going to keep doing this until Democrats fold and vote for the Republican bill that has no Democrat concessions, which is not how anything is supposed to work. Very uh abuser-coated, but we we knew that. Trump and his allies are trying to push that the Democrats have shut down the government because they want to quote, give health care to illegal aliens. And I want to be clear that is nonsense. I'm not out here trying to defend the Democrats that they've got their own problems, but they're not the ones who are unilaterally in power right now. And to say that their goal is to give illegal immigrants health care is whack. They don't even want to give US citizens health care. They're asking for not willingly increasing premiums on private health insurance that already exists. And the argument that they're trying to give illegal immigrants health care is based on completely nothing. It is a lie. They point to legislation that they hope you won't read because that's not what it says. This course of action, the threatening cuts, the freezing funding, the lying about what's going on is so much that even some Republican officials are quietly expressing their concerns about the predecessors being sick. If only they would be a bit more loud about their concerns instead of being cautious.