as I said before and I saw a few people agree with this, Congress is underpaid. The pay raise is the only thing I didn't object to. Well that's not true. That's hyperbole. But they are underpaid. Like I don't know if you understand how deeply underpaid they are but it almost encourages them to be corrupt just to pay the bills. You don't want Congress to be thinking, you know I could take this little gift because I'm running out of money to pay my bills. Remember a lot of Congress has to have two homes, one in their home state and probably some kind of residence in DC. So it's expensive and they have to go to a lot of events and stuff. So yeah they should be paid more. I think a 40% pay increase would have been completely appropriate in my opinion. But we should be accurate as well.

Then they say that Musk was wrong when he claimed the bill would prevent any investigation into the House committee that investigated the January 6 stuff. Was he wrong about that? Here's their argument for why he's wrong. They say the bill's text makes no mention of the riot and only clarifies that the House data stored elsewhere is still under the control of the House. I don't think that fact check is right. I think that they just looked at a different part of the bill. I'm not sure about this but my understanding is that the bill said that Congress's digital communication couldn't be accessed through a legal process. Everybody else's can but that Congress would be exempt from a legal process, let's say a lawsuit getting access to the communication. Now since I haven't read the bill I don't know that that's in there but that's the claims I've heard. I've heard that it would make their emails and digital communication private forever. Now that would, if they made that private, it would protect the January 6 group but also protect all of Congress. So was Musk wrong? I think Musk was right and I think the fact check is wrong but I'm not positive about that. So I'm going to put a question mark behind that. But to me it looks like the fact check is wrong.

Then there was the claim that the bill would support building biolabs, bioweapons labs. That apparently is a misinterpretation. That it instead funded what they call biocontainment labs that would conduct research to support public health and medical preparedness for and rapid response to biological events including emerging infectious diseases. Okay, what's the difference between a biocontainment lab that's studying all the dangerous viruses and a bioweapons lab that's creating dangerous viruses? Aren't they all the same? So again I'm going to put a question mark next to it but to me it looks like the fact check is wrong. To me it looks like they're just using a different name for essentially what the Wuhan lab was. The Wuhan lab wasn't a weapons development lab. Weren't they also trying to figure out how to avoid the weaponized viruses? So I think the fact check is fake but I'll take a fact check on my fact check.

And then there was something about building a stadium in DC but the fact check on that is that it was not funding it. It was simply changing control of it so the funding wasn't really addressed. It was just the control of the funding.

So Cheryl Attkisson had a funny story about her experience of a previous shutdown. So I'm just going to read what she said on X. So when she was a reporter working at CBS News during a government shutdown, she thinks it was 2013, they were searching for the real life terrible impacts of the government shutdown. So now it's just common sense, right? If the government shuts down it's going to have a devastating effect on members of the public because we depend on government for our vital services. So CBS News went out to look for all the terrible impacts of the shutdown and when we couldn't find any, that should have been part of the story. In other words there was no effect they could even find where it was bad enough that it was worthy of even being included in the story. Instead we kept trying to create the appearance of an impact. So when they didn't find an impact, instead of saying well we looked, didn't find any impact, they decided to write the article as if there was an impact.

She says, well this part, this bar, you can judge for yourself. It wasn't really trying to be dishonest. It was in my retrospective view because the general editorial idea for the story was to show how bad the Republican shutdown