The only reason this shutdown would target only DHS is that the funding bills for all the other agencies were passed and signed by the President. DHS is the only entity that isn’t funded for the fiscal year yet. (Although Republicans have ensured that ICE has plenty of money, any DHS shutdown won’t affect their operations at all.)

So, maybe there was a plan all along to maneuver Republicans into leaving the DHS bill as the last one to pass, so that a targeted shutdown can happen? That doesn’t fit the narrative of Schumer and Jeffries being incompetent, though.

I’ve seen whistles with the number for the local rapid response hotline printed right on them. Must have been one of those fancy multi-filament printers.

Donald Trump did not get elected to be President (twice!) by giving a shit about anything experts say.

It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. Michael Dell did it, after all, but he did it in a different time.

And Dell is actually a good case study for all this. It went public rather quickly after it started growing, but grew a bit stagnant by the 2000’s. So much so that 2013, Michael Dell orchestrated a leveraged buyout of his own company (with the help of venture capital) to make it private again. He pretty much admitted that the changes he wanted to make to the company would be impossible while it was still public. It stayed private for a while, but went public again as part of some deal made after it acquired the parent company of VMware.

Another notable thing is that Carl Ichan owned a large chunk of Dell, both in its first public incarnation and in its private incarnation. When Dell tried to take it private, Ichan challenged the plan, and thought about putting in his own bid, only to back off when he decided it wasn’t worth the effort to revive the company. Still, he was publicly against Dell’s buyout plan but was outvoted by other shareholders. Yet, he must have still held a part of the private company, because Ichan also protested it’s second plan to go public, and sued to force Dell to increase its terms to the private holders.

Michael Dell is no saint, but I conclude that he realized that the company meant more than a spreadsheet, and needed a purpose to justify its existence. He also realized that in order to sustain a business over the long term, having to constantly sustain quarterly numbers may be counterproductive. I think Carl Ichan, on the other hand, only cares about Number Go Up, and doesn’t care at all about how the company makes that happen. Over the long term, that will never be sustainable, but fuck you all, he got his bag already.

This is yet another thing I blame on American Business sacrificing itself on the altar of Shareholder Value. It’s no longer acceptable for a public business to simply make a profit. It has to grow that profit, every quarter, without fail.

So, simply having a good consumer product division that makes money won’t be enough. At some point some executive will decide that he can’t possibly get his bonus if that’s all they do, and decide they need to blow it all up to chase larger profits elsewhere.

Maybe we need a small, private company to come along and start making good consumer hardware. They still need components, though, so will have to navigate getting that from public companies who won’t return their calls. And even once they are successful, the first thing they will do is cash out and go public, and the cycle starts again.

Crikey

The moral of the story is that it’s a lot easier to get justice when you are a friend of the local police chief.

But I like this last bit:

MPR News reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about the incident. A spokesperson responded by asking for the woman’s name, date of birth and “A-number,” or alien number, which DHS uses to track non-citizens who are living in the United States. The woman is a U.S. citizen. To protect the woman from retaliation, MPR News did not provide that information to them. MPR news has not received any other response from DHS.

The newspaper reached out for comment about federal agents taking a citizen, and they didn’t even listen.

Donald Trump did not become President (twice!) by listening to experts…

But that’s not the conclusion of the article:

“Home sellers outnumber buyers by a record margin, meaning the buyers who are in the market have options and may walk away if they believe they can find a better or more affordable home.”

This makes it sound like the buyers that are in the market are making multiple offers, or at least are not afraid of breaking an offer if something better immediately comes up.

But, I guess that tracks, too. In this shitty economy, a lot of people simply know they can never afford a home at these prices, so the ones that are left in the market have more resources.

And I’m not an economist, but if there really are that many more sellers than buyers, shouldn’t that be leading to prices going down?

Maybe the Second Amendment people can do something about it

Isn’t it obvious? They say they are only going after criminals, but they lie. They will never get to their goal of deporting 100 million immigrants without going after the people who “came here the right way”.

This includes foreign-born naturalized citizens, by the way. Some of them voted for Trump because they believed him that he would only go after the bad ones. But they must realize they are also on his list, and have been all along.

Why do people still believe this man? Everything he says is a lie

He said the documentation also asked the store not to publicize the fact they received it.

“That was a request we chose to ignore,” Marshall said. “At the same time, we restocked our anti-ICE yard signs.”

Haha