Our House Was A V. V. V. Fine House, Plus

Some people are actually *paid* to do something, plus

Bit of a fixer-upper now, though (credit Weldon Berger)

Our House Was a Very Very Very fine House

Get those goddamn cats into the house now, Graham. You’re perpetrating a songbird holocaust.

As some of you will know, I’ve been homeless a couple of times due to prolonged bouts of I can’t cope with any of this anymore, and my housing has been federally subsidized since the 73rd year of our Lord & Saviour Roosevelt’s Section 8 program, which funnels federal money from the department of H&UD through local public housing authorities to private landlords—a bit of a convoluted process but it was what the big fella thought he could get at the time.

I love my neighborhood and my view

but this is an old and small apartment and not really suitable for visits from, for instance, a next generational familial unit. We know this because we recently tried it and although everybody loved the opportunity to get together, it was a tight squeeze and nobody was really excited about the logistics of it including the grandkid.

So when I saw my property manager advertising a considerably larger and more modern apartment that was sort of languishing on the market and was within my (the government’s) budget, I asked this past Friday if they’d consider going through the Section 8 paces on it and they said sure, come up and see it, which I made an appointment to do this afternoon.

Between then and now, yesterday afternoon in fact, the Trumpettes decided to freeze spending on everything keeping everybody alive, which is 1) illegal and 2) ill-defined, and is one of the kinds of things I was talking about yesterday when I wrote about taking a step back from the firehose to stop getting battered in the face with every fucking thing at once.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” according to the memo, which three people authenticated.

The new order could affect billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments while causing disruptions to programs that benefit many households. There was also widespread confusion over how the memo would be implemented and whether it would face legal challenges.

While the memo says the funding pause does not include assistance “provided directly to individuals,” for instance, it does not clarify whether that includes money sent first to states or organizations and then provided to households.

That italicized-by-me-latter could be me, and literally tens of millions of other people participating in various state- and locally-administered federal programs such as Medicaid and Section 8.

We’ve talked about the difficulty with proclaiming something like this freeze to be illegal; you have to first prove it and then enforce it, and the magic 8-ball is not sanguine about the prospects especially of the latter.

In the meanwhile, everybody in the federal government who distributes that money and everybody in state and local governments and community organizations who receive it have to figure out if this means them and if so, what they’re supposed to do about it.

I mean, is Section 8 a Marxist equity endeavor? Obviously not in a rational universe, but we don’t live in one of those and we’re talking FDR, so yeah, maybe? Could the Honolulu County office be forgiven for thinking this might mean them? Sure, maybe? I don’t know. I have a call in to my guy there, but I’m going to see the apartment anyway. It’s further out of town than I would like but it has an electrical dishwasher. I haven’t had one of those in decades.

Some people are actually *paid* to do something

Looking back on the 40 years full of potential off ramps from the road that led us here is I suppose not all that useful an endeavor in the moment, but I’m at least going to agree with Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, a beloved punching bag of the worm-brained right, when he says, about the Democratic struggle to break the Trumpian stranglehold on the news, “If the Senate Democrats are really looking for a viral moment that’ll get them attention, may I suggest firing Chuck Schumer into the sun?”

Schumer, you see, is in charge and historically representative of Senate Democrats, who are in the best position to gum up the legislative works, but he’s busy issuing five-alarm fire tweets about the new Chinese AI engine that just lopped $600 billion off Nvidia’s market capitalization. (To put that in a bit of perspective, it wasn’t even 20% of the company’s value as everybody agrees to understand that, although it’s still a lot of digits for one day.)

Schumer wants to spend space-race money and effort catching up with the dread Reds on AI—money that could be expensed, John Thune is no doubt telling him, against the cuts in my housing allowance. Schumer has objected to the freeze—illegal! illegal!—but one can imagine him musing that it might be worth it to thwart the heathen Chinee and keep Sam Altman in ketamine and ayahuasca, which is why neither Elon Musk nor Bezos are gonna take the commission to blast him into the sun. He’s too valuable where he is.

As with many of the administrative commandments issuing forth, this freeze is a Project 2025 product, relating to the imperial executive’s ability to impound funds appropriated by Congress. You might think that Democrats would have, after recognizing that they lost the election in whole, tasked some interns to read the thing and spend the next two months brainstorming about how to respond to all the shit that was prefigured in that extensively reported document and by the Trump campaign, but this does not appear to have happened.

Democratic leaders were instead consumed with gazing at the vast expanse of their motherfucking navels and seem now mostly to be stuck on telling Republicans they can’t do what they are very plainly doing. Schumer’s reaction quoted in the above-linked Politico story about the memo:

“Donald Trump must direct his Administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people. Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law.”

Illegal illegal yes well. Surely now that the president has been made aware of these actions he’ll reverse them. Meanwhile, the freeze of who knows exactly what funds is commanded to take effect at 5pm Eastern this evening, about the same time I’m going to look at what may or may not still be an apartment that I have some reasonable prospect of acquiring.

Interesting times!

Next Up: Homicidal Brain Worm Guy

That’s right, Fellow Humans: the worst Kennedy ever is scheduled for confirmation hearings tomorrow and Thursday in front of the finance and health and human services committees respectively. His cousin Caroline sent a letter to the committees asking them, in measured tones, not to confirm her psycho brother (pdf).

“His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”

Disqualifying? Who can say! We all have different ways of coping, or not, with our circumstances.

Music

Honestly I’m still traumatized by that weird-ass Xiu Xiu video for their “Common Loon” tune I listened to from the group’s 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips album (which, again, I liked but that video, jaysus he’p me) and I haven’t listened to anything since. I’ve linked it again because I don’t want to suffer alone. It’s like John Waters gone psycho.

Sally Fields

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Take care; be well.