Open Thread Feb. 22: Why Is Dumbbell Dave Lawson on the Joint Finance Committee?

Every day the Joint Finance Committee meets in Dover, the village of Marydel has to do without its idiot. The state’s Medicaid people told the JFC that this year’s budget is $754 million, down $6 million from last year, and Sen. Dave Lawson used the occasion to bitch that sick poor people “have no skin in the game” and so go to the ER when they could go to a walk-in clinic instead. Lead poisoning isn’t pretty, Dave. Have it checked out. Preferably at a clinic, of course.

Back before Donald Trump took over the Republican primaries, if you’ll remember, everyone had a Republican presidential hopeful they found most loathsome. Popular consensus was that Ted Cruz was the most abhorrent, but I always despised Marco Rubio the most. Cruz is repellent on the surface. Rubio pretends to be moderate, but he’s actually just Norman Braman’s butt boy. As Richard Wolffe (not the “Fire and Fury” guy, that’s Michael) chronicles, last night Rubio tried to pull his “Shucks, it’s such a tough problem” act at a town hall meeting and might have gotten away with — until a 17-year-old challenged him to turn away NRA donations. Rubio, always a profile in cowardice, couldn’t do it.

That’s just one of the signs that the NRA and its enablers are scared shitless. An upstate New York congresswoman Claudia Tenney — what is it with all the horse-faced bottle-blondes, GOP? This one looks just like your double agent Kirsten Gillibrand — told a talk-radio troglodyte ““Yeah, well, obviously there is a lot of politics in it, and it’s interesting that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats, but the media doesn’t talk about that either.” Yes, the dead kids really, really care which party their murderer belonged to.

Pennsylvania’s new Congressional map produced winners and losers on both sides, but the net result looks like a four or five seat benefit to Democrats. Daily Kos has a good rundown of how each new district shapes up. Several of the affected districts are in the areas just north of Delaware. The one taking it worst is up-‘n’-coming young shitbag Ryan Costello, a supposedly “moderate” Republican who went full-bore wingnut and called for the impeachment of the judges whose map is going to force him to get a real job.

The poor saps at Daily Kos really, really think they understand politics, and they really, really don’t. They’re running articles like this one, urging Democrats to “not blink” in standing up for the Dreamers. They’re so clueless they don’t understand that spending political capital on the Dreamers is precisely like paying ransom in the form for more hostages. Democrats must stand firm and NOT sell out the rest of us — or the rest of the people who’d like to immigrate here in the future — for the hostages Donald Trump took prisoner. They mistake soft-headedness for soft-heartedness. Let Trump shoot the hostages and clean up the blood himself.

Twitter purged itself of thousands of phony accounts the night before last, and conservatives all over the country went ballistic about it because most of their “followers” were among the “victims.” They actually claim that removing artificial accounts was an attack on conservatism, which is understandable — it’s hard to tell one fraud from the other.

And my best guess for answering the headline question: Because they needed another dumbbell as a counterweight to Harris McDowell.