So… What happens when you look in a mirror?

As a Ben, I think I speak for all of us when I say that this Ben does not represent us or our Benly sensibilities.

A few decades ago, the business guys realized they could trick Christians into voting for them if they said they themselves were Christians and opposed abortion. This relationship has now existed for so long that now many Christians have conflated Republican economic policy with Christian moral ideals and can’t seem to separate the two.

I’m a nurse, but work in a different speciality (psychiatry). I’m curious where you’ve heard 4-6 months? While he’s obviously not in a good state, he doesn’t look like imminent death to my only-peripherally-trained eye.

I dunno. He accused the board members who pointed it out of lying. If he had nothing to hide, why say they’re lying? Why not just say “I have no idea how this happened”? The only alternative explanation I can think of for accusing them is that maybe he’s paranoid?

Having grown up in the ultra-conservative puritan world, with its absurd and unhealthy levels of sexual repression, I would be genuinely surprised if this guy wasn’t regularly consuming porn. And he’s a millennial, so I wouldnt be at all surprised by him knowing how to connect a screen…

Egads, that poor child is probably going to have significant scarring around the cuts. Assuming he didn’t get a massive infection that they didn’t bother to get treated until amputation was necessary.

The guy who almost Luigi’d him was a Republican.

Hard to get the proper shots if the FDA doesn’t even know what the proper shots should be… Flu mutates rapidly, that’s why we get updated flu vaccines every year.

That happens from time to time; it’s incredibly hard to predict which strains will be prevalent months down the line, and flu mutates so rapidly that what’s circulating now might be a rather different strain from what will be circulating by the time the vaccine is rolling out. It’s frequently a shot in the dark, but shooting in the dark is always going to get more hits than not shooting at all.

So, a combination of reducing his costs and reducing benefits for the consumer. Sounds like the only one winning is him.

Come on, give him a break. Those are some big numbers! It’s not like just anybody could have figured out that 2 trillion was more than the entire 1.7 trillion discretionary budget. It takes a genius to figure out this stuff, a real genius like Elon “I’m a good dad” Musk, who is a stable genius and definitely was not an illegal immigrant at any point.

While Park said an [sic] seeing an enrollment cliff isn’t occurring just yet, […]

None of those people are 18 yet. The 2007 kids, from when birth rates last peaked, are just now 17. The declining birth rate hasn’t caught up yet.

The article says it’s multifactorial, but predominantly cost and the need to work;

The cost of college is the number one barrier to enrolling in higher education for adults not enrolled in such a program, according to a 2024 report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. That report also found that for more than three-quarters of the more than 3,000 unenrolled adults polled, cost and the need to work were preventing them from pursuing further education.

Can you imagine what it’d be like if mandatory childhood vaccines are eliminated? Can you imagine what a resurgence of measles or even polio would be like?!

No, you probably can’t, because vaccines made them non-issues before most of us were even born. And now they might come back because some dullard thinks he knows better than actual doctors and scientists. Dunning and Kruger must be crying themselves to sleep these days.

Decades of propaganda have convinced Christians that Republican=Christian, and the last decade of propaganda have convinced them that Trump is a good Christian man anointed by God and all the bad stuff they might hear about him is just Democrat lies. Many, if not most, honestly don’t know the half of Trump’s evils, let alone believe them.

Oh man, we’re trying! Fortunately the governor’s “school choice” voucher plans have stalled in the legislature for now.

Where can I buy a pair? … No, seriously, I’d wear these.

I’m not optimistic about her winning - this is Tennessee, after all. Outside of Nashville and Memphis, it’s a sea of painful ignorance and R voters. Even relatively purple places like Knoxville can’t seem to elect anyone other than R’s who are hellbent on destroying civil society for no particular reason - the pro-wrestler mayor dismantled the county health department in the middle of the pandemic, for crying out loud. And people applauded him for it!

I’ll donate to her campaign and cross my fingers, but I’m not holding my breath.