08 Oct 2026
08 Oct 2026
Per CNBC:
The Trump administration began sending $500 refunds1 on Wednesday to more than 950,000 Obamacare enrollees… Recipients are largely those earning more than 400% of the federal poverty line…
1Not really a refund; just a payment dictated by the WH.
In other words, a bribe to many folks who don’t need the money.
He’s also sending $90 checks to 20 million folks on Medicare. “Not eligible are … millions of … people with disabilities and low-income[s].”
When that $90 comes in, I’m sending it straight to the Talarico campaign.
I finished reading Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead. I have tons of thoughts about this wonderful novel, but they’re jumbled. For now, I think I’ll leave them that way. It’s wiser simply to be with this book for a while than to dissect it.
Even if the GOP barely keeps the Senate in November, is it possible that an impeachment trial in the next two years would convict Trump with some GOP votes, on the theory that kicking him out could help them in the 2028 elections?
Someone on the PBS Newshour noted that Trump’s banning of news agencies he doesn’t like is of a piece with his gutting of government inspectors general. Anyone whose job is to hold him accountable is his enemy.
Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard so close together. I am so grateful for both of them. May they rest in peace and rise in glory.
Jonah Goldberg:
I often roll my eyes when young people claim that older people “just don’t understand” this or that. We know what it was—what it is—like to be young; we just also know what it’s like not to be, too.
I’d say, “We know what it was like to be young when we were young. We know – in part – what it’s like to be young today”
All changed, changed utterly…
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
– W.B. Yeats, “Easter, 1916”
O, God, our times are in your hand…
– Psalm 31