US Government Shutdown — Question

https://forums.adobe.com/people/D+Fosse  wrote Let's talk about the future for a second. I just saw the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez video, the one where she talks about campaign financing. It speaks for itself. There is hope for the world.

Dag, thanks for putting us on to that.  Having watched it now, I am not sure what to say.   It feels like the press have got bored with outing President Trump for profiting from his position.  I've read that when POTUS is away from the White House, the Secret Service book the entire floor that the President is staying on, and if this is a multistory hotel, I understand they also book the floors above and below.  When the hotels are owned by Trump, then that comes to serious money, but AOC has clarified this to be entirely legal. 

I don't know enough about AOC to judge if she would make a good President herself, but she underlined how difficult that could be in her ethical standards speech.  With the staggering sum it costs to run for President, how would she finance a campaign without taking corporate dollars?

jane-e  I've been following the Post as we inch up to another possible shutdown.  One article that hit home was about a Government worker who has not recovered from the last shutdown, and is dreading it happening again saying she and her family will go under.  Sorry, I can't find it now.

Call me shallow, but I did smile at the bit about the Non Sequitur comic strip in the Post today.  I think the author sneaked it past the newspapers  he is syndicated to, and apparently, they are not amused. 

Lie detectors only work when people know they're lying.

Apropos of nothing, but just to give you Americans a bit of context. I was listening to a discussion on Norwegian radio the other day, with foreign correspondents and political journalists. The subject for the discussion was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The point of interest that everybody picked up on, was that absolutely nothing of what she stands for would be considered controversial here. It's all consensus policies here, from the left to the reasonably moderate right, almost nobody disagrees and none of it is even under discussion. She'd fit right into the mainstream.

Nancy Pelosi would be considered pretty much center of the Conservative Party here.

So when you see us Europeans gasp at the news we're getting - that's the context. It's like watching the news from Mars.

Thanks Jane.  I'll watch it when I am properly awake.   I watched both Trump's address and the Democrat response, and from a delivery point of view, and also content if you took then on face value, I thought Trump did a better job.  Certainly better than Nancy Pelosi.   And here lies the problem.  The Trump fan base will have taken it at face value, and as said back up the thread, they accept the content as fact even though they know that content fell somewhere between deception and down right lies.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/09/fact-checking-president-trumps-oval-office-address-immigration/?utm_t…

The above link went soon after the address, and the Post has expanded its reporting on it since then.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/09/trumps-speech-was-full-lies-it-also-gives-democrats-an-opening/?utm_t…

Hmmm...  I use an incognito window for my occasional forays into the Post, which just tripped me up, as I was not able to use the browser history to find the first link above.  Google came to the rescue though. 

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Nancy+OShea  wrote Essential personnel like TSA employees have to keep working during the shutdown but eventually they receive retroactive pay.

TSA employees have been calling in sick and security lines are growing.

Airport Security Lines Grow Across The Nation As TSA Sickout Continues

A bill passed the House this term that had passed the Senate last term with enough votes in both houses to override his threatened veto. The thing is, it would have to pass the Senate this term to be sent to his desk, and the Senate majority leader refuses to let it come back to the floor.

The problem is that the President and GOP leaders are treating this like a game with "winners and losers," instead of looking at what is best for the whole country.

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Peru+Bob  wrote They have always been paid retroactively, so those who are not considered essential get extra vacation days, while others like law enforcement, continue to work without getting paid until the mess is fixed.

The furloughed employees of the government have always been paid retroactively in the past, but this requires a bill to pass both houses, and the president to sign it. There is no guarantee that this will happen this time around.

Well that's at least partially reassuring, but not completely without casualties.

Speaking of casualties, the Washington Post carried a story yesterday about there being three deaths in NPs since the shutdown, which seemed just a bit flawed to me.  Sure enough, in the comments one reader looked up statistics that showed that about 300 people die in NPs in an average year (this is from memory — the article has 1500 comments now, and I am not about to trawl through them all) so the rate of deaths in the Parks is actually down.   It also sounds like the circumstances of the three fatalities last week, would not have lead to different outcomes if the Rangers had been at work.   Now if someone was unlucky enough to be attacked by a bear, because there were no Rangers to close that particular trail, that might be different.

I've visited several NPs, and loved them all [1].  The Grand Canyon probably had the greatest impact, because pictures just can't prepare you for the reality of your first steps to the rim.  I'll try and remember the others, but it was a long time ago.  Yellowstone, Arches, Yosemite, Badlands, Bryce, Zion, Death Valley, Everglades [2], Grand Teton [3]  Joshua Tree, and Mesa Verde.  Goodness, that's more than I realised, but nothing eastern.

[1]  A wee proviso for Monument Valley.  We arrived a bit too late to get a tour, and had to carry on driving so would have missed it, so we took off around it in the hire car.  To be honest, I did kind of now why several Navajo were shaking fists at us, but we pleaded ignorance, did our tour, and carried on driving.  The locals did not look the hapiest of people.

[2]  I'm thinking of Noel who has just moved from Florida to Minnesota to work at the Adobe Arden Hills location.  I hope his family are still speaking to him!   So at the Everglades it very pleasant, and the tourists all had shorts and a T-shirt, but the locals had long trousers and sweatshirts.  I guess it comes down to what you are used to.

[3] Being into fast bikes and a bit of a speed demon, I thought I could get down the Jackson Hole Alpine Slide without using the brakes.  I went over the side at goodness knows what speed and got a god-awful gravel rash that hurt like blazes for the rest of the holiday. 

My disaster was thirty to forty years ago, before they'd invented tiny video cameras, so this is not me.