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early june

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“Centrism festival” is not a phrase that would excite most normal people. But DC political types are not normal. So on Wednesday a bevy of political operatives, technocrats, and conservative Democratic lawmakers gathered in the basement of a Washington, DC, hotel for WelcomeFest, a corporate-backed event billed as the “largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.” The event, blazoned with the sizzling theme of “Responsibility to Win,” was held in a conference room big enough to seat several hundred people—and though the last several rows were sparsely filled, that was enough to make it a relatively hot ticket (again, purely in DC terms) on a sweltering summer afternoon. Who comes to a centrism rally for fun? Someone like Liam Kerr, the cofounder of WelcomePAC, the group that brought WelcomeFest to life. On Wednesday, Kerr wore a West Virginia University football jersey customized with former senator Joe Manchin’s name on the back—a tribute to the conservative Democrat most known for sabotaging his own party’s agenda. What’s a buzzy book at a centrist festival? Abundance, the tome by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has been embraced as a holy text by the Democratic right. (Thompson was also a speaker.) Who’s a big star at a place like WelcomeFest? Someone like Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, a Blue Dog Democrat and one of the few lawmakers in her party who at times votes in line with Republicans. It happened to be her birthday, and attendees toasted her while eating from a big transparent storage bin of gummy bears to celebrate the occasion. [...] There were scattered references to “everyday people” and calls on the Democratic Party to focus on the issues “keeping Americans up at night.” But campaign finance records reveal that the conference and the organizers of WelcomeFest are backed by several billionaires and other corporate interests, including the Walton family, Michael Bloomberg, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, the Revolving Door Project noted. The conference was also sponsored by the dark-money group Americans Together, which was founded by Joe Manchin’s daughter, Heather Manchin Bresch—better known as the former CEO of Mylan who infamously defended the company’s price gouging of lifesaving EpiPens. Many of the figures involved in the Abundance faction have financial ties to AI, crypto, and Big Tech as well. [...] As for actual policy substance, most of what the speakers promoted amounted to lightly rebranded neoliberalism.

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Geranium ‘Delft Blue’.

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interviewer: so how quickly would you say you are able to grasp new concepts and ideas?

me: when my mother was pregnant with me and my twin brother she watched a documentary about how it’s possible for one twin to actually absorb the other

interviewer: but it says here you’re an only child 

me: i am 

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The Trump Administration resumed collection efforts on defaulted student loans Monday after a roughly five-year hiatus — and affected borrowers could begin feeling the financial consequences sooner than experts expected. The U.S. Department of Education released new details on what actions it plans to take, when. Here’s what to know. Federal benefits could be garnished by June The Education Department said it began this week alerting around 195,000 student loan borrowers in default that their federal benefits will be subject to garnishment in 30 days. Borrowers could have their benefits, including Social Security retirement checks, seized by the government as soon as June, the Education Department said. Wages at risk over the summer The Treasury Department will send notices to 5.3 million defaulted borrowers about the collection activity of their wages “later this summer,” the Education Department wrote in the Monday press release. How student loan collection efforts have changed Since the pandemic began in March 2020, collection activity on federal student loans has mostly been paused. The Biden administration focused on extending relief measures to struggling borrowers in the wake of the Covid pandemic and helping them to get current. The Trump administration’s aggressive collection activity is a sharp turn away from that strategy, experts say. “Borrowers should pay back the debts they take on,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a video posted on X on Apr. 22. The U.S. government has extraordinary collection powers on federal debts and it can seize borrowers’ federal tax refunds, wages, and Social Security retirement and disability benefits. But in the past, student loan borrowers were usually given 65 days’ notice before the garnishment of their federal benefits, said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz. “Odd that they say a 30-day notice,” Kantrowitz said. Historically, the offsets to people’s retirement and disability benefits were also “a last resort,” Kantrowitz said, “occurring a year after wage garnishment and other attempts at collection had failed.” “Given the timing, it sounds like they are not pursuing the normal due diligence schedule for collecting defaulted federal student loans,” Kantrowitz added.

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fresno, calif. november 2024

© tag christof

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"I felt very scared and concerned as the men surrounded me and grabbed my phone from me," Ozturk said in the statement. They told her they were police, and one quickly showed what might have been a gold badge. "But I didn't think they were the police because I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this," she said... She said the men didn't tell her why they were arresting her and shackled her. She said at one point, after they had changed cars, she felt "sure they were going to kill me." During a stop in Massachusetts, one of the men said to her, "We are not monsters," and "We do what the government tells us."

— Tufts student recounts her detention by ICE, says she feared for her life in new court filing | CBS News

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original url http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Grove/2150/

last modified 2008-12-04 11:35:54

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“You tell yourself, ‘I want eggs,’ but explain to me what this ‘I’ is that you speak of? Can you point to it? Of course not. ‘I’ is a prison you’ve built for yourself. So long as you live within the ‘I,’ you live in a perpetual dream. Only when we dissolve this ‘I’ can we extinguish all of the terrible clinging and instead start living authentically in the realm of awakened life.” At press time, Trump had concluded by noting that it was thus that his Liberation Day tariffs were the path to freeing oneself from the karmic wheel of samsara.

Full Story

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Trump has undone years of progress.

And we're not even 100 days in.

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“Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs.”

— Senator Bernie Sanders at the 2020 Democratic National Convention

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Trump said the response to his staggering new tariff plan is “going very well.” “The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom,” he told reporters as he departed the White House.

— Live updates: Trump says tariff rollout is ‘going very well’ as global markets sell off

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Newsmax is ringing the opening bell today.

How poetic.