Or did I miss something?
As I age, I more and more frequently lose track of reality.
That’s often a good thing. Without a substantial capacity for self-delusion, I’d live a life of constant despair. My mental image of myself, for example, is in startlingly better shape that what I actually see in the mirror.
But as a byproduct, more and more real-world events get consigned to “free floating anxiety”, that catch-all area of the brain that knows something bad is going to happen, but isn’t quite clear on the details of what and when.
For me, this is compounded by bad genes. From my father, I appear to have inherited the affliction he termed Acute CRS. As in, “can’t remember shit”. Layered with an increasingly bad manifestation of Irish Alzheimer’s, where you forget everything except your grudges.
The whole situation isn’t helped by omnipresent fakes stories, now frequently augmented by AI-generated pictures and text. You now have to apply logic and reason to try to sift fact from fiction on almost any issue you’d care to name. Which sometimes puts that out of reach, even for somebody who tries to keep the facts separate from the fantasies. (Let alone the large fraction of the population that is incapable of any such “formal operational” reasoning, and is happier living with their fantasies than with trying to identify objective reality.)
This is all by way of saying that when I thought something bad was supposed to be happening, but I’m not seeing it in the news … did I miss something? Or has the problem just quietly gone away on its own. Or have the mainstream media collectively decided that it’s no longer a story worth covering?
OK, on point: Wasn’t the (tiny fraction of) the Federal government (consisting of non-critical discretionary spending) supposed to be shutting down any day now? But the deal this time was so weird that there were, like, multiple deadlines? Or something?
There’s been so much pointless jousting over this that I need one of those “Previously on … ” episode intros. Because I’ve lost the thread.
So I looked it up. The most recent stopgap budget deal occurred just before Thanksgiving 2023. That followed the prior stopgap budget deal made in September — the one that was the proximate excuse for replacing McCarthy as Speaker of the House. The November stopgap budget deal made the bold step of not changing anything about current funding levels.
That deal starts to run out in just over two weeks. So I’m not imaging it. But this time, there was a weird Republican-mandated twist of two separate deadlines.
Roughly one-fifth of discretionary spending runs out on January 19. The rest runs out February 2. So few people seemed to care enough about that that almost no coverage actually spells out what gets shut down when.
The only reporting I found that even vaguely spells out what shuts down when was from USA Today , which actually managed to provide a brief list of which Federal agencies are under which deadlines:
... funding for federal transportation programs, housing and food plans and other resources will expire on Jan. 19. The deadline for the Departments of Health and Human Services, Commerce, Labor, State and Defense comes two weeks later on Feb. 2.
Given that the current Speaker has firmly pledged never again to allow any stopgap spending measure to be brought up for a vote, and only to fund (the small fraction of) Federal spending subject to appropriations (a.k.a., discretionary spending) based on passage into law of twelve individual bills …
Why twelve? I’ve lost track of that, too. Is that the number of cabinet-level agencies in the Federal government? Nope. That’s just by chance the number of subcommittees of the House Appropriations Committee. Those appear to have evolved over time, and they only kind-of, sort-of line up kind-of with Federal agencies as defined by Cabinet secretaries. In short, it’s twelve because twelve is the tradition.
Further, I’m guessing the two deadlines have more to do with which subcommittees have some draft bill that has some hope of passage by Republicans in the House, and which do not. Originally, I was guessing that the twin deadlines were to allow Republicans to jettison the parts of discretionary spending that they think should not exist. But now I’m guessing it’s just a byproduct of … whatever goes on in order to pass anything in the House these days.
… you’d have to figure that, based on recent history, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that there’s not going to be a(nother) shutdown (of non-essentially discretionary) Federal government.
The only remaining mystery is why, with about ten working days remaining, I don’t see this even being mentioned in the press. Maybe the fix is in. Maybe it’s such a foregone conclusion that it’s no longer newsworthy. Beats me.
Source: Wikipedia.
But from my perspective, that’s mission accomplished. I can extract this one from mere free-floating anxiety, and fix it firmly as to both date and contents of this next self-generated crisis.
We now return to our previously scheduled fearfulness, unease, and disquiet.
