Ben.

Truly mystified as to why my family is being served Ritz-Carlton yacht collection ads. You cannot even find a quote to estimate how many lifetime earnings it would take you to “step aboard”.

@RAF_Luton One day the sleeping fighter manufacturing plants in Lancaster, Ca will awaken, shudder, and issue forth more of these fearsome aircraft. The world will tremble.

Photo of the Day: A Lancaster fighter jet is lit up by the midday glow of the Grangemouth (Scotland - UKs largest county) chemical works as it patrols Wales Over 8008.5 Lancasters fought in the Battle of Britain, only 717.5 remain in service today. Photographed from a Canberra

@janecoaston John the Revelator? Sung with vocal fry.

somehow it's the question mark that really does it for me here

@KUSINews That’s too bad. This looks like a 4-lane with basic bike lanes on either side. Would suggest neutralizing this headline and tweet a little bit so it doesn’t sound like the cyclist sought out a collision with a 1/2 ton pickup.

A bicyclist died Sunday night after crashing with a Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck on Troy Street in Lemon Grove. fox5sandiego.com/news/local-new…

@TBrown_80 @jaketapper By and large, no, because “pop culture that came before each generation” is a moving point in time and not fixed in 1983. Gen z/a have a lot of 90s nostalgia. Speaking for all millennials, we yearn for a return to ragtime and the top-hat.

The folks not knowing this is Robert Redford just reinforces my thesis that Gen-X may be the last generation to have a working knowledge of pop culture that came before them.

@SomeWelder Do you think ending access to free preventative care for people, regardless of their inherent moral character or motivation to work, will increase or decrease the costs you and your family pay for insurance, copays and medication?

I pay $30,780.00 a year for health insurance, with a max out of pocket of $18,500.00 (not including copays at the counter), for the missus and I, so you'll have to excuse me if I seem unmoved that you're losing your free healthcare, that somehow I also pay for.

@MarcGoldwein Is there a word in math/statistics for the space between two numbers you can use common fractions and percentages to describe? Like 20-21% is doinkle 1/5th while 19-20% is antedoinkle 1/5th.

Matt does good work, but saying 34% instead of “about a third” crosses a red line for me.

@AaronMehta Wholesome chain reaction.

Now THAT's what I call a "nuclear family," amirite

@mattyglesias This is inscrutable.

What if there were also tariffs between the states, and even counties and if you so choose, between households? Tariff signals between the right and left hemisphere of your brain.

@AaronMehta Nice to see these types of videos dropped by the service in a timely manner. Also; wut, no Eeeeegle as 4th Gen avatar?

2030s fighter, 1999's nu-metal.

@daithaigilbert @kellymakena Maybe consider calling them auditors, inspectors, consultants, quislings, knaves, imvasive species, spike proteins, implants, foreign bodies, free radicals, untethered quants. Operatives is a noun that doesn’t quite capture their origin and raison d’etre.

SCOOP: Elon Musk has installed 10 of his DOGE operatives at the Social Security Administration. We got their names w/ @kellymakena wired.com/story/doge-ope…

In what year would astronauts stranded in space for 8 months and 22 extra days have been more of a National News Event? I’m thinking daily check-ins. Counter clocks. Nightly news interviews. What year did this stop being a deal?

The Pentagon flagged an image of the Enola Gay—the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima—for removal, on DEI grounds, because of its name.

5 bullets? There were only 4 workdays last week.

I guess we’re all provinces now. C’est la vie.

@jmhorp @JessicaBRiedl We could write a bill to bill how we bill the bills.

But what shall we call this Office that analyzes Congressional Budget bills?

Now live at BaT Auctions: 1907 Ford Model R Runabout. bringatrailer.com/listing/1907-f…

“Why aren’t you cheering Trump & DOGE? I thought you wanted spending and deficit cuts!" Because I’ve been doing this for 25 years and can’t be tricked by gimmicky nonsense. Trump’s first term added $8 trillion in enacted spending hikes and tax cuts to the deficit - half of which was unrelated to the pandemic. This time around, Trump has proposed roughly $8 trillion more in tax cuts and spending hikes over the decade. And right now, a GOP Congress is preparing to abandon most reconciliation cuts and instead add $325 billion this year in new spending. We’re headed towards $4 trillion deficits within a decade. So, no, I don’t get excited when DOGE cancels $1 billion in govt contracts. Or saves $3 billion in federal workforce reductions out of a $7,000 billion budget. Not when Trump and Congress are also preparing to add $800 billion more annually in proposed new tax cuts and spending. And no, the huge savings are not coming. Even (unrealistically) eliminating 20% of the federal workforce would save $60 billion, and overhauling federal systems to sharply reduce payment errors may save perhaps $80 billion (and is probably unlikely too). For all of DOGE’s bluster, administrative and executive reforms would at best save 1-2% of federal spending and offset only a small fraction of Trump’s red ink agenda. That leaves trying to unilaterally impound spending such as USAID—which is wildly illegal—or actually going to Congress to pare back spending the constitutional way. But Trump has already taken Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans, border (and interest) off the table, which is 2/3 of all spending and is driving deficits. And the GOP Congress seems ready to give up on cutting the remaining one-third of spending. Want to cut spending and the deficit? How about they stop passing budget-busting bills. Don’t brag about your coupon-clipping frugality at the same time you are buying a $250,000 Ferrari. I’m not going to cheer Trump and DOGE for adding “only” $750 billion to deficits instead of $800 billion. We’re still going backwards. I’ve spent decades studying the federal budget. I know that $7 trillion(!) behemoth inside and out – where the money really goes, and where the savings opportunities lie. So I can also detect bullshitters who talk tough about trillion-dollar spending cuts without doing their homework. It’s the ones who claim most spending goes to undefined “waste,” federal salaries, immigrants, foreigners, Ukraine, or non-working welfare recipients. It’s the ones who claim we can easily balance the budget or cut $1 trillion without specifying exactly what line-items to cut. Or that we can return to 2019 spending levels for each program, which means a 20% inflationary cut, defaulting on the federal debt, and kicking off every senior who has since retired into Social Security and Medicare. It’s all hot air and empty bluster. Tough talk without following through on anything substantive. Just wait until you see the final deficit numbers in October. And this is why GOP movements to cut spending always fail. They make absurdly ambitious promises without doing their homework, understanding where the money goes, and specifying real plans to fix it. You can’t significantly cut the deficit just by cutting waste, firing bureaucrats, and defunding immigrants and foreigners. There are no easy short cuts. You have to stop cutting taxes and then address Social Security, Medicare, defense, and a lot of other popular programs. Wake me when the GOP goes there. So, no, I will not get excited about a couple billion in DOGE savings on one hand while Trump pushes Congress to add $8 trillion over the decade in tax cuts and spending with the other hand. I’m not that gullible.

@Acyn Storing federal funds in your freezer is protected by the Louisiana state constitution. The constitution, interestingly, is written on the back of a scratch-off lotto ticket.

Jessica: $120 billion in aid spent on Louisiana in the last two decades. Have you ever said anything about Louisiana?  Watters: Louisiana doesn’t have a history of misusing funds