A typically odd report on the govt shutdown - and other urgent business left hanging too long

"Affordable Care Act subsidies have become a battleground." They're "set to expire at the end of the year." Failing to extend, say Democrats, "would increase health care costs for families. And the prospect of higher health care costs alongside rising food and housing prices is weighing on Americans, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll" —

rather than known 2026 premiums now being disseminated throughout various states by ACA insurers. And extending the subsidies has scarcely been a partisan issue. They're especially popular in red states.

"But keeping the tax credit carries a big price tag. Permanently expanding the most generous benefits would increase the deficit by $350 billion, from 2026 to 2035," as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. That figure was far more prohibitive to "fiscally conservative" congressional Republicans than their Bigass Ugly Bill's more than $3.5 trillion of additional deficit costs over the same period.

"Scrapping the Affordable Care Act has grown politically risky. Perhaps sensing that, Republican leadership in Congress seems intent to change the topic away from the health care fight."

That reporting from yesterday's DealBook, published by The NY Times, whose overall political reporting is for some unfathomable reason incapable of expressing a straightforward declarative sentence.

Perhaps the Republican leadership senses universally acknowledged leaps in the national debt? (excepting the Republican leadership, all Republican pols, and most Republican voters). Said leadership seems intent to change the topic, which it factually, empirically and repeatedly has done in its insipid battle against the healthcare of 20 million Americans?

God love 'em, the Times' pathologically timid editors — not, I presume, their journalistic boots on the bloodied ground of the ACA battlefield — extend their diffidence and equally insipid deference to the bizarrely colored, weirdly coifed madman's regime to their at-large political coverage.

Read any Times story on the little despot's daily revelations of his deepening psychoses and you're sure to find usage of seems and appears to when referencing his brazen overthrow of America's 238-yearslong political system, far from a perhaps way of doing all things policy oriented. As well as America oriented.

Another item. On Sunday I expected to read the Times' reporting on Saturday's biggest political story, the No Kings protests. OK, maybe my haughty judgmentalism is faulty, I thought, because: no top headline. Yet nor was there a second- or third- or fourth- or fifth-tier headline. I soon gave up my search for its coverage of the blockbuster event. My reaction was dispirited but unshocked.

I can't responsibly explain the cause of the Gray Lady's shyness. As noted, it's unfathomable. I nonetheless remain a NYT addict. Besides, if nothing else its journalistic tics mock maga's tic about the paper as a radical leftist publication. Rules for Radical's author Saul Alinsky argued that (even unradical) power is not what a given resistance has, but what its opponents believe it has. So soldier on, you Alinsky-validating magaites.

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An aside from PMC Central. After pondering over the weekend my once-reasonably healthy readership numbers' collapse into the unreasonably acceptable statistical realm, I concluded that yet more daily posts on this site would be too pathetic in consequence for me to pursue. I looked down on this undesired development, and saw that my decision was good.

That's not to say I'm altogether done with posting. I had the same idea not all that long ago. And wouldn't you just know it? Within 24 hours, as I recall, I was unproductively and unprofitably at it again. So I'm skeptical of ... me.

Outside of irresoluteness on the subject of sparing whatever composure I have left, there's also this: I anticipate more posts in the very immediate days for reasons as unfathomable to me as is The NYT's deeply peculiar pusillanimity. Heavy lay the decision on this muddled head's crown.       

But clear are the historical forces aligned against all such sites:

The internet's deathly abbreviation of so many readers' attention span with its Twitter and Twitter-like sites; large sites' uniform negligence in linking to smaller sites' commentary (credit to Andrew Sullivan; he never cared about size when linking to mine in The Dish, which sustained growth in my once-regular readership for a couple years, but, natural attrition; the immense volume of small sites, whose visible static devastates nearly all readers' notice; virtually every site's unrelenting requests for contributions, including mine; and assorted other developments I'm too exhausted from recurrent despair to rehash here.

We'll see what plays out. Either way, I'll be as enlightened as you.

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Cross-posted in Substack.