DL Open Thread Thursday, June 24, 2021: The Sellout

Enough Democrats in the Senate have sold out their party to come up with a skinny infrastructure bill that won’t raise any taxes to fund $600 billion worth of repairs, which means rich fucks skate again thanks to Chris “I’m a rich boy, how ’bout you?” Coons.

A couple of former NRA honchos got the punking of the year. They showed up to give a speech to the graduating class of “James Madison High School” in Las Vegas, and wound up speaking to 3,000 empty chairs, representing the number of kids killed by gun violence who won’t graduate this year.

The Arizona “audit,” a clown show from jump, seems to be falling apart as even Republicans realize it was a clown show from jump.

John Roberts, writing for a 6-3 majority, just tossed out 100+ years of precedent to create a new right for employers fighting unions. Try not to act shocked.

Remember how civil liberties scolds told us that all the surveillance Congress legalized in the wake of 9/11 would come back to bite us? Now it has. Oracle has a program that can sort through millions of data points in seconds to track “terrorist” activity. Of course, if it can do that, it can track any kind of activity, and Oracle has peddled it to China, which is using it to crack down on “terrorists” who want democracy.

There’s a newly approved drug for treating Alzheimer’s disease that shouldn’t have been approved at all. In testing it offered no relief from symptoms, but it did clear amyloid plaques from patients’ brains. It was thought those plaques caused the disease, but clearly they don’t — if they did, their removal would have improved the patients’ symptoms. It’s a placebo-by-proxy — I’m sure relatives will feel better for giving it to their loved ones — that will cost taxpayers $56,000 per year per patient.

There’s probably more, but I’m fucking disgusted. The floor is yours.