The hot dog bill

Yesterday the Senate passed its version of the Republican cruelty bill, the "One BBB," or as I like to think of it, the "Brutal Bashing of anyone not a Billionaire Act of 2025." It's not a done deal yet, the House now has to decide if they're OK with the Senate's alterations and if not, make their own changes and send it back to the Senate.

But in some form or other, the damn thing is probably going to end up getting signed into law. And whatever form that is, given how the Republicans have behaved thus far, it will be disastrous.

Josh Gondelman compared the bill to a hot dog on the latest Bugle podcast: It might be slathered in appealing-sounding condiments, but it's not good for anyone and the more people find out about what's in it the less they want anything to do with it.

I won't go into the details of all the nasty, mean, and literally lethal aspects of this bill. You can read about them all over the Internet. But in short, it will:

• Transfer more wealth from the lower strata of Americans to the richest of the rich than ever before
• Deprive millions of health insurance and make it untenably expensive for millions more
• Penalize green energy initiatives while rewarding fossil fuel industries and polluters
• Deprive millions of low-income Americans of SNAP benefits (food stamps)
• Cause rural hospitals to severely limit their services or shut down entirely (despite a provision added to get a Senator or two to vote in favor that establishes a $50 billion fund for rural hospitals; that'd fund, what, ten hospitals for a year?)
• Impose new bureaucratic hoops to jump through for those not summarily deprived of services in order to discourage people from using said services
• Revamp Federal student loan policy to be far more onerous and remove eligibility for Pell grants from nearly 10% of applicants
• Make it easier for the wealthy to cheat on their taxes
• Boost funding to the regime's burgeoning Secret Police (via DHS, ICE, and other "border enforcement") to levels higher than an entire branch of the actual US armed services
• Directly increase the Federal deficit by about $2.5 trillion and indirectly increase it by another $2 trillion or so via expected tax non-compliances and by another $1 trillion or so in added annual interest

There is nothing good in it. Nothing. Even the so-called "no tax on tips" provision is a smokescreen that effectively changes nothing (it only applies to cash tips, which nobody ever claimed on their taxes anyway and are an increasingly small share of tips, and has other restrictions as well). It is entirely a gift to the billionaire class and several kicks in the teeth to everyone else. Every Senator and Representative that voted in favor of it should be ostracized.

The fact that even Sen. Lisa Murkowski was bought off to vote in favor of this nightmare (by partly exempting Alaska from SNAP cuts, of all things) is both maddening and befuddling. She is/was one of the few remaining semi-sane Republicans and even she can be strongarmed into siding with the cult with very little effort.

What's really upsetting is that this catastrophic legislation might not be the worst thing in the news this week. The new concentration camp gulag in Florida might get that "honor" just for its brazenness.

It's all so fucking hopeless right now.

I'm going to go play softball tonight, and try, at least for a few hours, not to think about the fact that we're governed by the most evil people to ever hold office in this country.