News bits: Tales from Twittwerlandia, etc.

MTG gets booted off Twitter for copyright infringement: A Twitter person got a hold of a letter sent by Dr. Dre’s attorney to the lovely MTG. She used one of Dre’s songs in her online propaganda poison and the good Dr. was not pleased that his music was being used without his permission to support fascism. Yikes! Kerfuffle alert!

The letter contains a couple of interesting comments, quoted below.

“One might expect that, as a member of congress, you would have a passing familiarity with the laws of our country.” Ooh, that was snarky. Naughty lawyer. One seasoned observer commented: “Legal snark is my favorite snark!” Bwaaahahahaha!!!

“It's possible, though, that laws governing intellectual property are a little too arcane and insufficiently populist for you to really have spent much time on.” Ouch, gut punch!

“You are wrongfully exploiting this work through various social media outlets to promote your divisive and hateful political agenda.”  That’s called copyright infringement and, as an added bonus, her political agenda is divisive and hateful.

“We’re writing because we think that an actual lawmaker should be making laws, not breaking laws, especially those embodied in the constitution by the founding fathers.” Another gut punch, but a good point. Protection for copyrighted material is actually in the original constitution. Art. 1, Sec. 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries (that means copyrights and patents are protected)

The Marjorie is not pleased

Dammit, she liked that Dre song!

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From the Filling the Congressional Swamp With Fascists Files: Here we go, gird up you loins boys and girls. Included in its first official action, the House gutted the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). The Repubs said they were gonna do that and by golly they did! Newsweek optimistically (😵) comments: 

Three of four Democratic-appointed OCE board members will also be removed due to term limits under the changes, leaving Republican-appointed members in nearly full control of the office before Democrats are able to add new members, which may take months.

There was excitement in the Repub House caucus with the elimination of all concerns for ethics and the rule of law as applied to Repubs in the House. George Santos, the spreader of whopper lies is now off the hook for lying his way into congress. He excitedly exclaimed: Fantastic! MAGA!!

OK, he only said Fantastic! I added MAGA!! to tastefully and artistically emphasize Santos’ understandable excitement at his get out of the slammer free card.

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Corruption in the swamp at the Supreme Court: Business Insider writes about the transition of the super obscure Supreme Court Historical Society (SCHS) to a now much less obscure pay-to-play way for donors to get direct access to Supreme Court justices. This is corporate and fascist partisan moral rot to its very core. Funding for the obscure SCHS quietly accelerated after 2000 when it decided to get aggressive about looking for ‘donors’, a/k/a paying players. BI writes:

In 2000, the SCHS decided it would select new trustees for its board of directors largely based on their ability to provide “financial support” for the organization. [than means setting up a pay-to-play cash harvesting operation]

Before Silverman raised the alarm, the society hadn't attracted much attention — or money — from people outside the legal profession, Insider's review of the nonprofit's trustees throughout the 1990s found. Most of its donors were legal-history buffs and aging philanthropists.

But it wasn't long before new faces started showing up at society events and board meetings.

In 2003, the Ohio real-estate developer Don Wright joined the board of trustees. In 2007, so did Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza. By 2010, they were joined by the GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, the son of the real-estate magnate Trammell Crow.

These new members were part of a wave of right-wing ideologues, corporate representatives, and wealthy conservative power brokers who flocked to the Supreme Court Historical Society over the past two decades, Insider's analysis found, using the little-known group to gain unprecedented access to one of the most elusive and secretive judicial bodies on the planet. The donors leveraged relatively small sums of cash into privileged face time with the very Supreme Court justices who were in some instances deciding cases to which their companies or affiliated advocacy organizations were parties.

An analysis of the society's donors published by The New York Times in late December identified at least $6.4 million in donations since 2003 coming from groups or individuals that argued cases before the court. (The Times had previously reported that one donor, the anti-abortion activist Rob Schenck, claimed to have used the society to infiltrate Justice Samuel Alito's inner circle and gain access to information about a pending decision.)

Insider's investigation into nearly three decades' worth of Supreme Court Historical Society records found that the extensive network of donors and trustees with vested interests before the court was rife with right-wing religious activists and corporations. In exchange for as little as a few thousand dollars in contributions to the nonprofit, these people received easy access to events where Supreme Court justices would be.

The Supreme Court has recently been criticized as biased and conflicted due to the donors who get access to the judges through SCHS social events. Chief Justice Roberts vehemently denies that any conflicts of interest exist. Right. And pigs with wings can fly too.

Chief Justice Roberts is either a corrupt liar or corrupt and stupid. Since he is very, very smart, we can eliminate corrupt stupid as a possibility. What does that leave? Hm. Corrupt liar? Yup, that’s what it leaves.

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Did Joe Biden screw the pooch?: The NYT writes:

President Biden’s lawyers discovered “a small number” of classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank last fall, the White House said on Monday, prompting the Justice Department to scrutinize the situation to determine how to proceed.

The inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter, is a type aimed at helping Attorney General Merrick B. Garland decide whether to appoint a special counsel, like the one investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents and failure to return all of them.  

The documents found in Mr. Biden’s former office, which date to his time as vice president, were found by his personal lawyers on Nov. 2, when they were packing files at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, according to the White House. Officials did not describe precisely how many documents were involved, what kind of information they included or their level of classification.

One can just hear the howls of self-righteous faux moral outrage from the Republicans in the House. There will be an investigation or two. There probably will be an impeachment or two of Joe for one or more alleged treasons, crimes and/or horrors. One can only hope that Joe didn’t break any laws.  

News bits: New kind of quantum entanglement discovered, etc.

New kind of entanglement lets scientists see inside atomic nuclei: The Brookhaven National Laboratory writes:

First-ever observation of quantum interference between dissimilar particles offers new approach for mapping distribution of gluons in atomic nuclei—and potentially more

Nuclear physicists have found a new way to use the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a particle collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—to see the shape and details inside atomic nuclei. The method relies on particles of light that surround gold ions as they speed around the collider and a new type of quantum entanglement that’s never been seen before.

Through a series of quantum fluctuations, the particles of light (a.k.a. photons) interact with gluons—gluelike particles that hold quarks together within the protons and neutrons of nuclei. Those interactions produce an intermediate particle that quickly decays into two differently charged “pions” (π). By measuring the velocity and angles at which these π+ and π- particles strike RHIC’s STAR detector, the scientists can backtrack to get crucial information about the photon—and use that to map out the arrangement of gluons within the nucleus with higher precision than ever before.  

“We measure two outgoing particles and clearly their charges are different—they are different particles—but we see interference patterns that indicate these particles are entangled, or in sync with one another, even though they are distinguishable particles,” said Brookhaven physicist and STAR collaborator Zhangbu Xu.  

RHIC operates as a DOE Office of Science user facility where physicists can study the innermost building blocks of nuclear matter—the quarks and gluons that make up protons and neutrons. They do this by smashing together the nuclei of heavy atoms such as gold traveling in opposite directions around the collider at close to the speed of light. The intensity of these collisions between nuclei (also called ions) can “melt” the boundaries between individual protons and neutrons so scientists can study the quarks and gluons as they existed in the very early universe—before protons and neutrons formed.

Nerds Daniel Brandenburg and Zhangbu Xu nerding

around with the STAR detector on the RHIC

Well, looks like 2023 is starting off with a big bang. Keep up the good work nerds -- smash those atoms real hard!

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Commentator tears the Supreme Court a new one: In delightful commentary on Chief Justice Roberts year end report, Dahlia Lithwick writing for Slate is scathing and funny at the same time:

The Chief Justice is burying his head in the sand 

when it comes to the biggest problem with SCOTUS

It’s been eight long months since the unprecedented leak of the draft opinion in the landmark abortion case, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health. When it happened last May, Chief Justice John Roberts described it as a “a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court.” As the nominal head of that Court, it was up to Roberts to investigate the leak, and then presumably do something about it, but in the intervening months, the internal investigation of the leak—as ordered by Roberts—has plodded on without any disclosures to the public about what Harriet the Spy and Inspector Gadget, or whichever crack detective tasked with solving the crime has turned up.

This shocking leak, for which Sen. Ted Cruz once insisted that someone be “fired instantly” and also “prosecuted” and also “serve real jail time,” has already gone the way of the great un-crackable mysteries of our time. .... Justice Clarence Thomas may have once characterized it as “an infidelity” that had profoundly shattered trust among the Justices, but apparently the Court opted to continue operating without the restoration of that trust. So much so, that it need never be discussed again. .... Weird. In a building populated by about 500 employees, almost none of whom would have had access to a near-final draft opinion, the identity of the Dobbs leaker is going the way of the Bermuda Triangle and Amelia Earhart. Though the leak supposedly traumatized the institution and its members, the agreement seems to be that we need never speak of it again.

So perhaps nobody should be surprised that this great Supreme Court mystery—a breach of trust in an order of magnitude previously unheard of—appeared nowhere in the pages of the Chief Justice’s annual year-end report on the federal judiciary. That report, which dropped, as it does, on New Year’s Eve, was widely covered for its lack of references to several important issues that faced the Court this year. These included: the Dobbs leak, the Supreme Court Historical Society’s perplexing role as secret pipeline for SCOTUS access-seekers and their fat wallets, and any references to Justice Clarence Thomas’ continued insistence on ruling on cases that directly affect his own wife (this would seem to violate the ethics rules that bind the Supreme Court, but as we now know, they do not bind the Supreme Court). None of these crises were mentioned in the report. Why? because these controversies all make the court look hinky AF, and Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t want that.

The real mystery, then, isn’t merely how Roberts’ year-end report ended up centering threats to American judges as the most urgent concern of the past calendar year. .... No, the real whodunnit following Roberts’ report, has to be this: Who killed the last vestige of shame down on One First Street? Because Benoit Blanc, call your office. I want to report a murder.

To take on that actual responsibility would demand accepting a leadership role that includes speaking truth to uncheckable power, even if that uncheckable power belongs to the court. The Chief Justice knows well what crises have beset the high court and its reputation this past term. But all he wanted to talk about was how that manifests as threats to judges.

But certainly the expectations of a court reflecting on its own complicity in public’s distrust of it were at zero by the time Samuel Alito was giving triumphal insult-comic speeches about Dobbs in Rome this past summer, and when Ginni Thomas was still insisting that the 2020 election was stolen by Biden in September, as her husband rules on Jan. 6 cases. Indeed, it has become fairly obvious that if you can’t beat the ethical challenges at the court, you can just join them. Or at least cover for them.

And that, it seems, is the play. The Chief Justice continues to doggedly reframe public anger at the court as one of two things: the public’s problem, and also a security risk to the Justices. .... the public is struggling to understand how it can possibly have faith in a court with no braking mechanism on its effort to remake the constitution in two years. In response to that anger, the court put up security fencing. Now imagine if the Chief Justice had spoken candidly about that.

One is left with the dispiriting sense of John Roberts as doubly cursed: Unlike some of his conservative colleagues, he is well aware of the multiple ways in which the Justices themselves are doing violence to the court’s reputation as unbiased and above the fray. However, because there’s nothing he thinks he can do about it, he’s refusing to acknowledge it. He’s taking all the evidence of the shoddy and unethical behavior and sweeping it under the carpet, then pointing at the mound of carpet crap and blaming it on the American public.  

As pregnant Americans attempt to reimagine dealing with their pregnancy losses, their thwarted birth control needs, their new economic realities, and their live saving medical needs thanks to Dobbs, the Chief Justice’s choice to center himself and his colleagues –ensconced in the protections of lifetime tenure – was a choice to blind himself to suffering of which he is well aware. Judges are suffering after the 2022 term. So are millions of others. Refusing to see the connection is the problem, not the solution.

That nicely sums the condescending arrogance and ghastly disingenuousness of Christofascist Republican elites. Roberts is a master of sophisticated propaganda tactics like misdirection, obfuscation, lies of omission and the like. In the immediate future and for the foreseeable future, we can reasonably expect more insulting lies of omission and blatant deceit from arrogant Republican judges like Roberts. 

Q: Although Lithwick claims that judges are suffering, is that true? (seems that would mostly depend on how one defines suffering, e.g., loss of public trust, physical threats, insults by the public, cognitive dissonance, whatever)

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From the Flogging Dead Horses Files: Juan Williams writes in The Hill:

The rotten state of House Republicans

McCarthy has been reduced to a weakling. He will be constantly cringing under fear that a snap vote by the far right will oust him. Such a vote can now be called if even one GOP member asks for it.

They have picked a Speaker but they have no real leader.

And with Trump in decline, there is no national leader of the party going into the 2024 cycle.

Looking back to 2021, President Biden made the right call by not negotiating with hardline House Republicans during his first two years in the White House.

He relied on Speaker Pelosi.

Even with a narrow majority, her expert leadership freed him from the chaos politics of the GOP’s far-right.  

The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page recently described the House radicals’ lack of interest in good governing this way:

Too many of them are “more comfortable in opposition in the minority…which is easier because no hard decisions or compromises are necessary. You can rage against ‘the swamp,’ without having to do anything to change it. This is the fundamental and sorry truth behind the Speaker spectacle and the performative GOP politics of recent years.”

So, another commentator sees chaos, dysfunction and nastiness ahead for the next two years. That seems to be a reasonable prediction. We will find out pretty soon what the House can and cannot do, and just how nasty it is going to be. 

The way to neuter civil liberties and split America into two countries: Evade the Supreme Court

A Jan. 5, 2023 article in the New Yorker written by Jeannie Suk Gersen, the John H. Watson, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, describes a brilliant avenue of legal attack to undermine civil liberties by evading the Supreme Court. The first major success for this evasion tactic was scored in a decision that upheld a cherished goal that the radical right Christian nationalists have long sought in their quest to neuter civil liberties.  

The law at issue was Texas Senate Bill 8, which banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. Similar past laws always failed due to Roe v. Wade. But this time, the anti-abortion law was drafted differently. What was new and different was that SB8 provided that only private citizens, not the state, could enforce the law. Because of this citizen enforcement scheme, there was no defendant for pro-abortion plaintiffs to sue in court. That effectively pushed the Supreme Court out of the picture.

The New Yorker writes:

On the day that the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the lawyer Jonathan Mitchell was at the National Association of Christian Lawmakers conference, where he was to receive an award for having enabled “the most successful pro-life legislation to date.” Mitchell was the author of the legislation that had effectively ended abortion access—first in Texas and then in Oklahoma—while Roe was still good law.

Unlike most lawyers and legal scholars who profess to be committed to the rule of law, Mitchell does not find it disturbing that several states, following his advice, managed to nullify a constitutional right long before the Supreme Court did. That is because his mission is to undermine the Court itself as the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution. He first laid out his arguments in several law-review articles, one of which proposed that legislatures could “overcome federal-court rulings” they oppose by drafting statutes that insulate them from judicial review. He then put his arguments into practice, using abortion as the perfect test case.

Senate Bill 8, which Texas enacted in September, 2021, banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. Since Roe, such bans had not survived constitutional challenges in court. But, rather than put any state officials in charge of enforcing the ban, Mitchell saw to it that S.B. 8 would empower only private citizens to enforce it, by suing abortion providers (or any aiders and abettors) in state court. Abortion clinics, scared of being sued, largely fell in line, following the new restrictions or closing entirely—even though the legislation clearly defied the Court’s abortion cases. Whole Woman’s Health and others sued Texas officials, in an effort to block the ban, but Mitchell felt confident that they would be unsuccessful, because state officials had no part in enforcing the ban. By his design, there was no defendant to sue—and that meant a law openly flouting the Supreme Court’s constitutional precedents could remain in effect.

When the abortion providers’ case reached the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan was scathing about the notion that “after, oh, these many years, some geniuses came up with a way to evade” the Court’s command “that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights.” Conservative Justices sounded troubled by it, too. But then five conservatives largely acquiesced in the scheme to shield the statute from judicial review, even though, as Chief Justice John Roberts lamented in dissent, “the clear purpose and actual effect of S. B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings.” More than six months before the Court overruled Roe, the Court gave its blessing to box out the federal judiciary itself.  

For more than a year, Mitchell has mostly refused to talk to journalists on the record. But, in the past months, he agreed to conversations with me, in which he emphasized the broader stakes of the tactic for which he became known. Early on, Mitchell insisted that, although he personally opposes abortion, “I’m not an anti-abortion activist. I never have been.” His goal is to destroy “judicial supremacy”—the idea that the Supreme Court is the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution—a campaign with bipartisan potential at a moment when liberals and progressives have little to gain from an imposing conservative Court. Liberal legislatures, for example, may wish to defy unfavorable precedents on guns, campaign finance, free speech, and voting rights.

This article has finally tipped me into a (slowly growing) belief that it is slightly more likely than not (~53% chance?) that America is destined to split into two or maybe three separate nations within the next ~12-15 years. What is at issue here goes directly back to the bitter, never resolved disagreements among the drafters of the Constitution. They never agreed about the scope, shape or power of the central government. That included bitter disagreement about the scope of power of the Supreme Court. In 1803, the Supreme Court itself declared that it alone was the final decider of what is constitutional and what isn’t. That assumption of power came in the famous Marbury v. Madison decision. 

Through the 1900s until recent years, that assumption was largely accepted. That was a core unifying principle that everyone except fringe extremists respected. That was necessary to hold America together. 

But decades of radical right propaganda and relentless legal attacks has finally led to reopening debate over literally everything in the Constitution, including all of the Amendments. Everything is now back on the table. This is no longer a fringe extremist argument. It has effectively gutted abortion and significantly neutered the Supreme Court, at least for civil liberties that are not enumerated in the Constitution and Amendments. 

The seeds of destruction of a single, secular America have been planted and sprouted. Now we get to watch the poison plants grow and kill what has been built since the founding of the Republic.

News bits: Fascist violence in New Mexico, etc.

Is fascist violence becoming a new American normal?: The NYT writes about recent shootings at homes and offices of five New Mexico Democrats:

No one was injured in the shootings, which occurred in Albuquerque between Dec. 4 and Thursday. The authorities are investigating whether they were related and politically motivated.

No one was injured in the shootings in Albuquerque involving three residences, a workplace and a campaign office associated with a pair of county commissioners, two state senators and New Mexico’s newly elected attorney general. Three of the shootings took place in December and two this month, the latest of which was on Thursday, the authorities said.

The Albuquerque police chief, Harold Medina, said at a news conference on Thursday that there could be a pattern to the shootings, possibly tied to political affiliation.  

The department did not announce the shootings earlier, he said, because it was not clear in December whether there might be a pattern.

Mayor Tim Keller of Albuquerque said the authorities were concerned that the shootings might have been targeted and were “possibly politically motivated.”

So far, there are no suspects in custody. The shootings could be by one or more individuals or groups. It could be by a single insane person. The shootings could be by an enraged communist who thinks that Democrats are tyrants. Or it could be a rabid Christian nationalist who thinks that Democrats are pedophilic, cannibalistic agents of Satan who have been vaccinated against Satan’s atheism-inducing COVID vaccine. There are all kinds of angry nutjobs, freaks, cranks and crackpots out there who could have done this. So, there’s all of that.

But -- there is almost always a but. But, relevant political circumstances here include normalization of violence, intolerant extremism and publicly expressed hate of liberals and Democrats by some of America’s fascist radical right. The first thought that comes to mind is that the shootings are politically motivated by a Republican fascist or Christofascist. Political circumstances also include these public comments by Faux News very own Tucker Carlson, arguably the current leading propagandist, liar and slanderer working for American fascism:

“That loathing [of liberals] clouded my judgment. I was like, ‘I dislike these people so much. What they’re doing is so wrong. It is helping so few people and hurting so many. It’s so immoral on every level that I just want it to be repudiated.’ And I wanted that so much, not because I like the Republicans — I really dislike them more than I ever have [he is a liar on this point] — but I dislike the other side more. I did learn that, like, I have no freaking idea what goes on in American politics.[he is a liar on this point -- he knows exactly what is going on]”

One can reasonably ask if it is irrational, unfair, wrong and/or unwise to immediately jump to the conclusion that one or more fascist Republicans are responsible for this violence. Maybe that is more true than false. But in view of the poisoned, radicalized politics and polarizing propaganda the radical right has fomented for decades, why give fascism or the fascists the benefit of one shred of doubt? If evidence comes to light that these shootings were not by a politically motivated fascist, then this initial conclusion will be wrong. This is just a matter of the radical right reaping one of the important things it has ruthlessly sown for decades, namely distrust.

Qs: What harm is there in drawing what appears to be a reasonable initial conclusion and then revising it if contradictory evidence comes to light? Is that more anti-democracy than pro-democracy, or is it mostly democracy-neutral?

Democratic New Mexico State Senator Linda Lopez 

Eight shots were fired at her home in Albuquerque on Tuesday

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A historian’s take on the dangerous state of American politics: A NYT opinion by Yale history professor Joanne Freeman discusses the election of McCarthy to House Speaker. She is an expert on political violence in American politics. She writes:

It’s Tempting to Laugh at McCarthy’s Struggles, 

but History Shows That This Type of Chaos Is Not a Joke

In recent days, we’ve watched congressional Republicans reap the whirlwind. In campaigning for the 2022 midterm elections, the G.O.P. rode a wave of extremism, saying little about the politics of hate and denial practiced by some of its candidates in an effort to capture votes.

The party is now paying a price for its silence. Its members are grappling with the reality of working with people who loudly and proudly challenge political institutions and the democratic process — in a democratic institution. During the speakership battle, that small group of extremists held the House of Representatives hostage.

This was far from the first time the House was mired in a stalemate over the speakership. It’s the 15th such battle in Congress’s history, and the ninth time that electing a speaker required more than three ballots.

There’s little good faith in today’s House. After years of election denial, promises broken and lies abounding, the left has little faith in the right. And some parts of the right have little trust in their own most extreme members who skillfully practice a politics of personality — playing to their constituents and to the nation at large with sweeping claims and broad denials, personal attacks on the opposition, and a willingness to upset core tenets of democracy, all with joyful exuberance at damage done.

The resulting speakership struggle was not about an issue. It was not about a policy. It was about power. Kevin McCarthy’s reported concession to empower the extreme right by making it easier to oust him as speaker was a surrender of power — and that’s all a potential speaker has to offer in today’s political climate. Promises to support key bills or logrolling mean nothing in a party that has very little real planned legislation and very few policies.

It’s tempting to laugh at the strut and fret that took place in the House, much of it seemingly signifying nothing. But it was not just theatrics, and it was not a joke. It was a symptom of a dysfunctional party that is questionably anchored in a democratic politics, and a glaringly obvious sign of things to come. Given Mike Rogers’s near-lunge at Matt Gaetz on Friday night, it’s also an eerie echo of things past.**

** That refers to previous instances where the House could not decide on a Speaker due to policy differences, most prominently over the fate of slavery. Physical fights in the House occurred. Here, the GOP fight was over power, not policy, making this much more dangerous than past fights. In authoritarian regimes, power is king, while in democracies, policy is supposed to be king.

The House has elected a speaker, but that won’t put an end to the internecine Republican battles. They will continue, entangling Congress and stymieing national politics in the process. Politics is a team sport that requires captains, congressional politics, even more so. Today’s congressional Republicans are not a team; they have no captain and they have displayed their failings for all the world to see.

In effect, we’re witnessing the rupture of the Republican Party, the ultimate outcome of Republicans’ continuing failure to stand up to the extremism in their ranks. In choosing to remain silent in the face of their right wing’s politics of destruction, they have essentially endorsed it. Their silence in the face of Donald Trump’s lies and his election loss denial did much the same, laying the groundwork for the upheaval that we’re watching now.

It’s encouraging to think that there are moderate Republicans who don’t support this brand of politics. There are certainly many. But until they organize themselves and oppose their in-house opposition, they’re pushing the nation ever closer to a dangerous edge — and defining the Republican Party in the process.

Q: Is Dr. Freeman correct to say that there are many moderate Republicans in power, or are most of moderate Republicans gone, having been RINO hunted out of power like Liz Cheney? Exactly what is a moderate Republican these days?

News bits: McCarthy becomes House Speaker, etc.

McCarthy is Speaker, so now what?: To me, the situation has gone from seriously bad to significantly worse. The NYT sums it like this:

As the Republican leader has made concessions to the far right, he has effectively agreed to give them carte blanche to disrupt the workings of the House — and to hold him hostage to their demands

The United States should brace for the likelihood of a Congress in perpetual disarray for the next two years.

The recipe for the chaos already existed: A toxic combination of the Republicans’ slim governing majority, an unyielding hard-right flank that disdains the normal operations of government and a candidate for speaker who has repeatedly bowed to that flank in his quest for power.

In a recent comment PD argued that, lacking an iron fisted leader, GOP elites are not fascist, but instead constitute a toxic political force driven mostly by “good old American nihilism and avaricious individualism.” Trump has fallen from the position of iron-fisted tyrant-leader to a person with less power. Regardless of what the Republican elites are, and maybe they are two or more different things, the road ahead looks bad for democracy, civil liberties, social spending, and a reasonably functioning federal government. 

The ~20 holdouts are rabidly anti-government opportunists. Unless the other Republicans choose to work with Democrats and commit the treason they call compromise, the 20 have veto power over whatever the House does. They intend to gut social security, Medicare, Medicaid and other domestic spending programs when the current spending authorization runs out next September. They claim to be willing to refuse to increase the debt limit when necessary. That gives them the leverage to gut domestic spending programs when the time comes next fall.

Q: Should House Democrats have voted for McCarthy, thereby avoiding the transfer of power to the 20 radical anti-government extremists, or would that have made no difference?

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Corporations quietly sneak back to the GOP: In the wake if the 1/6 coup attempt, CREW writes on Jan. 6, 2023 about where corporate sympathies currently lie:

• In the days after January 6th, at least 231 corporations and industry groups pledged to stop, pause, or re-evaluate their political giving to the 147 members of the so-called Sedition Caucus. Two years into their commitments, 65 companies have kept their promises not to give, while the rest have resumed giving.
• 1,345 corporate and industry group PACs have given $50.5 million directly to the campaigns or leadership PACs of members of the Sedition Caucus, and $18.9 million to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
• The top 5 corporate PAC donors since January 6th are Koch Industries ($1,374,500), Boeing ($936,500), Valero Energy ($827,500), Home Depot ($790,000), and AT&T ($786,900).

In the days that followed, at least 231 corporations and industry groups pledged to stop, pause, or re-evaluate their political giving to the 147 members of the so-called Sedition Caucus. CREW has been tracking all corporate PAC contributions to these members since then, from companies that made a commitment and companies that did not. By January 6th the following year, 130 of the companies that had made commitments, including many that strongly condemned the violence and attack on our democracy at the time, had started giving again through their affiliated PACs. Two years into their commitments, 65 companies have kept their promises not to give, while the rest have resumed giving, often quietly and without making a public statement.

For brass knuckles capitalism and capitalists money talks, while inconvenient truth, democracy, the public interest, the environment, civil liberties and most everything else walks.

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From the land of no gun safety laws: The NYT writes about another sad school shooting:

A 6-year-old first-grader at an elementary school in Newport News, Va., shot a teacher on Friday afternoon during an altercation in a classroom, the authorities said, leaving her with “life-threatening” injuries and renewing calls for greater gun restrictions.

The boy, who shot the teacher once with a handgun at about 2 p.m., was in police custody on Friday evening, Steve Drew, the chief of the Newport News Police Department, said at a news conference.

Will something be done to control this kind of senseless violence? Other than sending out useless thoughts and prayers, can anything be done now that the radical right Supreme Court has made it almost impossible impose gun safety laws? There is plenty of public support for reasonable gun safety laws, but the Republican Supreme Court opposes gun safety and does not care about public opinion.

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Additional commentary on the House Speaker position and the Republican Party: A NYT opinion piece opines:

Why the Fringiest Fringe of the G.O.P. 

Now Has So Much Power Over the Party

This Washington drama reflects larger structural forces that are changing American democracy.

Revolutions in communications and technology have transformed our democracy in more profound ways than just the more familiar issues of misinformation, hate speech and the like. They have enabled individual members of Congress to function, even thrive, as free agents. They have flattened institutional authority, including that of the political parties and their leaders. They have allowed individuals and groups to more easily mobilize and sustain opposition to government action and help fuel intense factional conflicts within the parties that leadership has greater difficulty controlling than in the past.

Through cable television and social media, even politicians in their first years in office can cultivate a national audience. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez entered Congress, she already had nine million followers on the major social media platforms, more than four times the number for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and an order of magnitude more than any other Democrat in the House. Recognizing the power social media provides, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a provocateur in the opposition to Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid, has said he wants to be the A.O.C. of the right.

The internet has also generated an explosion of small-donor donations, which enables politicians to raise large amounts of money without depending on party funds or large donors.

Once again, one can see that social media exerts a major influence on politics. It conveys both honest, unifying speech and dishonest, divisive speech. Unfortunately in view of how the human brain-mind works, the latter is a lot more influential than the former. That’s probably why is it so popular and persistent.

I wonder if AOC’s social media speech is as divisive and dishonest as what Matt Gaetz puts out. In view of modern circumstances, maybe a politician has to be aggressive and opportunist. Does that mean they also have to rely heavily on deceit, lies, slanders, fomenting irrational emotion, and crackpot reasoning, e.g., like the fabulist liars George Santos and Trump?

About Missed Opportunities

 

 

There is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance.

 ― Ottessa Moshfegh

INDEED!

Right now Kevin McCarthy is making concessions to the extreme right to get him to 218. And the Dems? Eating popcorn? Enjoying the shit show? 

Listening to Michael Smerconish this morning, he wondered if the Dems aren't passing up an opportunity.

WHY are THEY not negotiating with the Republicans to get one of their choices, even McCarthy, over the finish line? AND get some concessions in return? So instead of the radical right getting concessions, moderates and Dems get some.

Consider this:

Democrat Mary Peltola open to forming coalition majority with Republicans

Liz Ruskin, a D.C. correspondent for Alaska Public Media, tweeted that Peltola said that she supports House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) for the Speakership, but she is open to discussion if House members want to form a coalition majority, as often happens in Alaska. 

“Anything that gets us communicating with each other rather than talking at each other would be a good thing at this point,” she said. 

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told CNN on Wednesday that he was in “preliminary talks” with Democrats to support a consensus candidate but wanted to hold off on sharing details of the discussions to not get ahead of where negotiations stood.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/democrat-mary-peltola-open-to-forming-coalition-majority-with-republicans/ar-AA161fkZ?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=0a1df9634e674f63bf25783fed8cd6a9

Imagine spanking them thar radicals, AND getting some of them thar concessions of your own!

AND as an added bonus:

Rep. Matt Gaetz threatened to quit Congress Thursday if House Republicans make a deal with Democrats to elect a GOP speaker ― and his critics were hilariously eager for him to make good on that pledge.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/matt-gaetz-i-will-resign-laura-ingraham_n_63b8065de4b0ae9de1bd8ab0

NOW THAT ALONE WOULD MAKE A DEAL BETWEEN DEMS AND REPUBS WORTH WHILE!