Hi, everyone. Welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boiler. Good news.

There will be no interminable introduction today because it's our last show of the year.

So instead of talking about a thing, we're going to break new ground and podcasting by opening the

mailbag and taking a bunch of your questions. My dance partner for today is Crooked Media's very

own queen of hysteria and very smart question answer, Aaron Ryan. Hi. Hi. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, it's great. I was like super excited when this idea came up in our in our secret

positively dreadful planning meetings and now it's happening. Yay. So I'm not going to pretend that

like I'm getting these questions cold because I'm actually going to read them and they're about

half on politics and half on other stuff. So I figure we'll like start with the politics since

I can probably answer those more credibly and then switch gears and then call the year. How does

that sound? Sounds great. All right. First question is from Mark and he asks,

the following hypothetical events are real concerns with the GOP-led House and Democratic Senate.

You know, it's not a complete list, but they are one. We blow through the debt ceiling and

crater the world economy and are paralyzed by not having control of both chambers.

We, I suppose he means Democrats, two. We avoid a debt ceiling showdown by striking a catastrophic

deal that cuts the welfare state. Three, a parade of impeachments. Four, the special select committee

on the laptop from hell. So that's the preamble. The question is how do Democrats get organized

and situated to either contain these situations or stop them before they start given that they're

not even interested in raising the debt ceiling with full control of Congress.

Mm. Aaron. Starting out small, I see Democrats. What the fuck?

This is going to sound a little bit, I don't know, maybe maybe I'm just, I've been a little bit

deliberately not engaging with all of the possible doomsday scenarios that are coming up

...