I do wonder about stores like that. According to a friend of mine who worked on the household staff of a very rich family, they did buy extremely expensive stuff in boutique stores even when much cheaper alternatives were almost as good (or even equally good, I suspect) but how many rich people like that are there? That same friend told me that at least some of those stores are vanity projects for that same sort of rich person - they want to own the sort of store they think is cool or cute, and they don’t actually need it to turn a profit.

In the eyes of anyone who wants to elect pragmatists who don’t tilt at windmills.

I’m not sure why people want him to humiliate Democrats by trying something doomed to failure. Hegseth can’t be impeached successfully unless multiple Republicans support doing so.

So we’re at the “I didn’t do it, but if I did then it isn’t so bad” stage.

I did a double-take too, but she’s wearing skin-colored shorts with a red stripe on them over tights.

Either you choose to persevere against the un-enjoyable-ness, or you don’t.

I find that often my hobbies don’t make me feel “I look forward to doing this” before I start, or even “I am enjoying doing this” once I do. But they do make me feel “I’m happy that I did this” after I’ve made some progress.

(This is a very hard lesson for me to truly internalize.)

My favorite part of this is that the redistricting would have had no problems in court if the Republicans had simply not talked about their race-related motives in public.

With that said, I don’t have high hopes for the Supreme Court here.

My guess is that they’re not particularly outrageous but they are damaging in a nonpartisan way (or else Biden could have released them). Maybe the unreleased information is about Epstein’s work with intelligence agencies, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans would want to release and individuals with access wouldn’t feel a moral obligation to leak.

But that still doesn’t explain why Trump doesn’t just say so without revealing any details - it seems less damaging than total stonewalling.

But the money is actually pretty good.

I’m not sure why this is a better argument against a 50 year mortgage than against 15 or 30 year mortgages. The author does say that 50 years gives more opportunities to refinance, but many people who buy homes don’t intend to live there 50, 30, or even 15 years. For these people, the only thing that matters is the monthly payment and the choice of a lower payment but with more of that payment going towards interest can be a rational one.

That’s what I’m saying.

Things that are numbers:

• a memory address
• the letter B
• an error encountered when trying to open a file
• the concept of being false, as opposed to being true

Things that are not numbers:

• this particular floating-point number

he has no control over his party

He can’t actually order them to do anything. One might argue that if he was a better leader, he could have persuaded them to stick with the plan longer, but maybe he had already done that weeks ago and this is the longest that anyone could have persuaded them to hold out. It is the longest shutdown ever, after all…

It was me.

The random sample survey of 604 D.C. residents was taken between August 14 and 17 shortly after Trump signed the executive order. It indicates some 65 percent of residents do not believe the presence of FBI agents and uniformed National Guard troops from an increasing number of states makes the city safer.

Eight of 10 residents surveyed oppose Trump’s executive order to federalize law enforcement in the city. Seven in 10 oppose it “strongly.”

Source.

I’m not sure why they thought a DC jury would ever convict, given that even a DC grand jury (which hears only the prosecutor’s side) didn’t indict.

Things intended to be temporary often end up permanent, especially when it is in the interest of the party in power to make them permanent (and gerrymandering is always in the interest of the party in power, because that’s the party that does the gerrymandering).

With that said, the intent to revert this gerrymandering is the intent to rebuild the town, but even if the town will be rebuilt someday, it’s still being destroyed now. California Republicans have a right to representation, and the Democrats are deliberately depriving them of that right because of something that totally different people in Texas are doing.

I’ll extend the war metaphor: sometimes military necessity dictates a course of action that will cause civilian casualties, but even then we should still acknowledge that there are civilian casualties and that that’s bad.

I think you’re probably right, in the sense that not doing this would probably be even worse, but we’re destroying the town to save it, as the saying goes. Win or lose, there won’t be much left of a very important norm.

Because disenfranchising people is the solution to disenfranchising people. But who knows - this may be the least bad option.

The article seems to be saying that the VA is no longer classifying breast cancer in men as a “reproductive organ” cancer, and therefore it’s no longer eligible for automatic coverage in some contexts the way that other cancers of the reproductive system are. I’m not sure why this is an issue, because I’ve never heard of any ideological claims about male breasts which the Trump administration might wish to oppose.

He married her and he wants her to convert, but there’s no reason to think that he married her for the purpose of converting her.