…some days
Vote to oust McCarthy is a warning sign for democracy, scholars say [WaPo]
…it’s just plain difficult not to interpret some stuff as an insult to intelligence
The House can’t function without a speaker [WaPo]
…when…they could just be indications of its absence
Why Is the Public’s Business at the Mercy of a Few Extremists? [NYT]
…or…the sort of oxymorons that are legislatively inert “lawmakers”
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1709589473573392484.html
…which…”naturally”…would be one of those feature/bug deals
McCarthy’s ouster comes as House Republicans confront a caucus that is increasingly nihilistic, intent on obstructionism, chaos and pulling the kind of public stunts that make for good fundraising emails. Much of the party’s congressional delegation is in thrall to Donald Trump – or at least, they feel that their seats depend on convincing their primary electorate that they are. And his is not a faction much concerned with coalition building, difficult choices or the hard work of actually governing.
[…]
The simple fact is that last week, as the clock dwindled down to a government shutdown, Republicans weren’t accepting any of the deals that he offered them because making an actual deal to keep the government running is not in the interests of Republican congressmen – interests which they seem to understand as encompassing little more than maximizing attention to themselves. Unable to pass a resolution with only Republican votes, McCarthy crossed the Rubicon of Republican politics: he compromised with the Democrats. And in so doing, he sealed his fate: he gave attention-hungry members of his caucus a chance to demonstrate that they were more rightwing than he is.
[…]
McCarthy’s ouster is a symptom of Republican dysfunction. To many of his Republican foes, notably Gaetz, the dislike of McCarthy appears to be intensely personal, ascending beyond policy differences or factional loyalties into a contempt of character. Mitch McConnell has clashed with him over Ukraine; other members of the Freedom Caucus have cast him as soft and untrustworthy. Republicans have descended into backbiting, disunity and petty competitions of egos. The party is beholden to a base that it has fed misinformation and trained to view politics as high-stakes entertainment. If they were women, we would call this a catfight. But they’re men, at least for the most part, and so we call it politics.The Republicans cannot govern and it remains to be seen whether they will even be able to elect a new speaker. Their internal dissent is not compatible with governing, with democratic aspiration, with the dignity or responsibility of power. But to them, that might not matter. Their nihilistic, sadistic and exclusionary worldview does not really need to govern, or build a coalition, or make things better for Americans: it just needs to stop the other party from being able to do so. In this sense, they’re getting exactly what they want: a fight. Meanwhile, there are those on Capitol Hill acting in unison, with uncanny discipline, allowing their opponents to destroy one another without so much as lifting a finger: the House Democrats.
The party is beholden to a base that it has fed misinformation and trained to view politics as high-stakes entertainment [Guardian]
…but then…when it comes to business as usual
But facing thousands of litigation claims, Saint-Gobain has engaged in the “Texas two-step” tactic that other large corporations including Johnson & Johnson, Georgia-Pacific and Trane Technologies have also used. It involves offsetting liabilities into a corporate entity and filing for bankruptcy through the new firm, resulting in lawsuits to be suspended.
[…]
The legal maneuver has been criticized as an abuse of the bankruptcy system used by highly profitable corporations to escape accountability. All four companies have utilized the same law firm: Jones Day.Amiel Gross, a former attorney for Saint-Gobain turned whistleblower, testified that the company misrepresented its intent in forming the new subsidiary, and records revealed the company planned its two-step bankruptcy for months under the code name “Project Horizon”.
Saint Gobain reported record revenue and profits in 2022, with over $55bn in revenue, over $5.7bn in profit, and over $1bn returned to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks.
[…]
“They made a huge profit selling this pipe that they knew would kill people,” said [Meredith Good, an attorney representing Bergrud’s family with MRHFM, the largest law firm in the US devoted to mesothelioma cases]. “They knew the amount of dust that was getting released. They knew the asbestos that was released and the guys who were doing the work had no idea. It is possible to make cement pipe without asbestos, obviously, because asbestos, as far as we know, isn’t being used now. But asbestos was cheap.”
[…]
“Billionaires are using bankruptcy as a menu choice,” said Thompson [another attorney representing Bergrud’s family at the same firm]. “You’ve got an entity like DBMP that wants to be in bankruptcy. It doesn’t have anything to reorganize. It doesn’t have any operations and so CertainTeed is happy for DBMP to sit and rot in bankruptcy for as long as possible. Meanwhile CertainTeed can’t be sued.”A spokesperson for Saint-Gobain North America said in an email: “We are confident in DBMP’s legal position and our ability to reach a final, full and fair resolution with asbestos claimants. We continue to support DBMP’s intention to equitably and permanently resolve current and future asbestos claims.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/04/asbestos-mesothelioma-victims-compensation-certainteed
…it somehow comes down to the same apagogical absurdity that continues to insist on the primacy of a misconstrued “bottom line”
MAGA Wouldn’t Be Such a Threat if the Electoral System Worked [NYT]
Ever since learning that in 1947, Walter Lippmann popularized the term “Cold War” to define the emerging conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, I thought it would be cool to be able to name a historical epoch. Now that the post-Cold War has expired, the post-post-Cold War that we’ve entered is just begging to be named. So here goes: It’s the age of “That Was Not the Plan.”
I know, I know, that doesn’t trip off the tongue — and I don’t expect it to stick — but boy is it accurate. I stumbled across it on a recent trip to Ukraine. I was speaking with a Ukrainian mother who explained that since the war started, her social life had been reduced to occasional dinners with friends, kids’ birthday parties “and funerals.” After typing her quote into my column, I added my own comment: “That was not the plan.” Before last year, young Ukrainians had been enjoying easier access to the E.U., embarking on tech start-ups, thinking about where to go to college and wondering whether to vacation in Italy or Spain. And then, like a meteor, comes this Russian invasion that turns their lives upside down overnight.
…&…sure…it’s an oversimplification to say it comes down to particular people with a dismal tendency to be blinded by an overestimation of their own cleverness…which by all appearances is blinding
There are many reasons for this, but none are more important than the work of four key leaders who have one thing in common: They each believe that their leadership is indispensable and are ready to go to extreme lengths to hold on to power as long as they can.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/opinion/putin-xi-trump.html
[…]
Needless to say, watching Donald Trump’s effort to overturn our 2020 election by inspiring a mob to ransack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and then seeing this same man become the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024, makes our next election among our most important ever — so that it won’t be our last ever. That was not the plan.
…but then…what does the smart play look like?
The cost has been high. In Germany’s case, the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predict that it will perform worse this year than any other advanced economy. Certainly there are many reasons for Germany’s slowdown: Interest rates are high, supply chains have been disrupted by disease and war, and the country’s car industry faces new competition from electric vehicles. But it does not help that, as the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck wrote recently in American Affairs magazine, Germany is being asked to participate in “an economic war that is to some extent also a war against Germany itself.”
[…]
It used to be that when Europeans needed a bit of wiggle room from the American empire on a matter of desperate importance, they could simply claim it. In 2002 and 2003, the chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, and President Jacques Chirac of France defied the government of George W. Bush, refusing to participate in the invasion of Iraq. What has changed to give American preferences the power of binding imperial fiat?[…]the system by which the United States seeks to lay down laws for the whole world has more to do with economics than with brute force. Over the past two decades, the United States has made use of a novel, often mysterious set of tools for rewarding those who help it and punishing those who cross it.
That set of tools is now a bit less mysterious, thanks to two political scientists, Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins and Abraham Newman of Georgetown. Their book published last month, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the Global Economy,” reveals how the United States benefits from a set of institutions built up late last century as neutral means of streamlining global markets.
These institutions include the dollar and the bank-messaging system known as Swift (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which is based in Belgium and run by an international board but vulnerable to American pressure. It helps that the rise of the internet has made the United States home to much of the wired world’s circuitry and infrastructure, including, in our time, some of the major cloud computing centers of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google.
The United States now has the ability to survey and influence the world’s communications and supply chains, should it choose to. After the Sept. 11 attacks, it chose to. It bent the institutions to which it had access into a defensive (as it then saw things) weapon in the war on terror. “To protect America,” Mr. Farrell and Mr. Newman write, “Washington has slowly but surely turned thriving economic networks into tools of domination.”
[…]
American policymakers have weaponized the world economy in a way that is hard for democracies to register, let alone influence. There are a lot of legitimate populist complaints to be made about this sort of elite control: You hear all the time in Italy and Poland, for instance, about how the European Union entrapped member states in its post-Covid recovery fund programs and then attached unreasonable conditions for delivering the money.The most striking thing about the Farrell-Newman critique — and perhaps a source of its strength — is that it is not populist. The authors’ understanding of the Russia-Ukraine conflict — as an unprovoked Russian attack by a leader who “seems to believe the Cold War never finished” — differs little from that of the State Department. Even their account of the American regulatory empire is a description more than a gripe. The authors hint they would not be half so worried about these regulatory means if only they served worthier ends — say, fighting climate change instead of protecting American hegemony.
Whatever it may be used for, the weaponization of the global economy is proving to be an unreliable tool of American might. The problem is that in the economy as it has existed since the Cold War, everyone pretty much trades with everyone. Countries that have the most reason to fear the United States have responded by trying to construct alternative arrangements. Over the past year and a half, Russia has shown a resilience in the face of an all-out economic war that China and Iran are likely to use as a model. By contrast, those countries that are friendliest to the United States — Switzerland a decade ago, Germany today — have suffered for not yet having bomb-proofed their economies against the American economic weapon.
The U.S. Has a New Set of Tools for Bullying the World [NYT]
…& sure…it’s not always about the money
US supplies Ukraine with a million rounds of ammunition seized from Iran [Guardian]
…but…even if it’s mostly out of its ass…or more charitably…the side of its ravenous maw…money talks…& enough of the stuff can be loud enough to perform feats of electoral sophistry…even as it drools all over itself…& the rest of us
The reality is that Trump has plenty to capitalize on, but the question remains: With his venomous and often incoherent rants, with 91 felony charges against him, with his White House record of chaos and mismanagement, has Trump worn out his welcome with all but his hard-core MAGA loyalists?
I posed these questions to a cross-section of scholars and political operatives. Their responses suggest that Trump might well be a competitive nominee in 2024, with the potential to win a second term in the White House.
…still…it has an appeal to some
Broadly, I think the themes you outline can be simplified to “We’re the victims, and the victimizers are getting away with murder.” And yes, I think they’ll apply this year as well as in any year when the “we” includes a coalition of elites and paycheck-to-paycheck working folks, each of whom reasonably see themselves as losing ground they once felt confident belonged to them (however ill gotten that ground was in the first place).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/04/opinion/crime-immigration-inflation-republicans.html
[…]
This is a country that generally makes life hard for working people and is busily shifting symbols around that are meaningful to people who identify as white. Under those circumstances, it’s easy to manipulate feelings that life is not fair into feelings that “we” are being persecuted by “those people” who are stealing what “rightfully belongs to us” — literally, figuratively and with all appropriate scare quotes.
…even a cost/benefit analysis is tricky when you measure costs one way but the benefits might be of an altogether different order
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/opinion/life-expectancy-college-degree.html
…& the downside might come at you out of left field
Why So Many Americans Are Losing Trust in Science [NYT]
…as a wise man once said…though opinions differ as to which one…so let’s go with the version from one of chesterton’s efforts because it gives me an excuse to encourage anyone & everyone to read the man who was thursday
“It ain’t so much men’s ignorance that does the harm as their knowing so many things that ain’t so.”
…not least when it concerns things on the horizon
Historic EU deal reached on how to manage sudden rise in asylum seekers [Guardian]
…or the other sort of misapprehension when it comes to the inevitable “equal & opposite [over-]reaction”
…well…it can come as a surprise if don’t you make a habit of bathing in bullshit
Mr. Bannon has spent years promoting the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, railing against coronavirus mandates and what he refers to as a “criminal invasion of the southern border.” His obsession of late was toppling Mr. McCarthy and taking out what he describes as “uniparty” Republicans who have become indistinguishable from Democrats.
With Mr. McCarthy’s historic downfall this week, his wing of the party has claimed its most prominent trophy.
Mr. Bannon represents a clear through line from the grievance-driven MAGA base to Congress. And his role in the meltdown that played out this week in the House helps explain why the Republican Party appears to be eating its own. He is a vital part of a feedback loop of red-meat media hits and social media posts, online fund-raising and unfettered preaching to an often angry and fervently right-wing base that rewards disruptions and detests institutions.
In past decades, right-wing rebels on Capitol Hill have encountered trouble getting real traction — shunned by lobbyists and big-money political action committees, excluded from leadership suites in the Capitol and disregarded by Fox News. But with the help of Mr. Bannon, who streams live for four hours every weekday, Mr. Gaetz and others don’t need to rely on any of that.
…the consistently inconsistent motif is…let’s go with exhausting
Ms. Mace has previously called Mr. Gaetz a “fraud” and accused him of opposing Mr. McCarthy because he wouldn’t defend him against “allegations that he sex-trafficked minors.”
But all of that appeared to be water under the bridge the morning after Mr. McCarthy’s ouster. They were, at least temporarily, allies. On Wednesday, they sat next to each other in Mr. Bannon’s basement, where books about China, Trump and sensible weight loss programs live in messy piles on any flat surface that avails itself. Notes from Mr. Trump written in his trademark Sharpie (“Steve! Your show is sooooo great — Proud of you! Donald”) sit stacked with other miscellany.
The group was still digesting the historic events of the previous day, while figuring out their next moves. They decided, together, to use Wednesday’s broadcast to look ahead, rather than to “dunk” on the former speaker.
[…]
Mr. Gaetz has described himself to people as a “Bannonite tribalist.”Mr. Bannon, for his part, is in awe of Mr. Gaetz, whom he compares to Daniel Webster. He credits the Florida Republican with recognizing early on last year how helpful a slim G.O.P. majority could be to the hard right.
[…]
“This is red meat,” Mr. Bannon exulted, as Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana defended an amendment that would prohibit mandatory coronavirus vaccines for service members, referring to the vaccine as an “experimental drug.”Mr. Bannon, an unrepentant agent of chaos, admits he was spoiling for a government shutdown.
“You create a firestorm now that totally changes things,” he said. “People right now think government is a benefit. I’m going to show government spending as cootie-infested.”
From a Capitol Hill Basement, Bannon Stokes the Republican Party Meltdown [NYT]
…so…as forrest gump’s mama always said…stupid is as stupid does…& it seldom has much inclination to stop doing it
Wiatros-Motyka [senior electricity analyst and the lead author of the report][by the climate thinktank Ember] told the Guardian that tripling the world’s renewable energy capacity was the “single biggest action that governments can take to put the world on a course for a 1.5C-aligned pathway”.
Carbon emissions from generating electricity need to fall to net zero by 2045 globally, and by 2035 in advanced economies, in order to reach the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, according to modelling by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The IEA’s influential net zero roadmap suggests that the combined share of solar and wind power would need to increase from 12% last year to 40% in 2030 to remain on track.
To achieve that, global renewable capacity would have to triple by the end of the decade, which would require solar power to grow by 26% every year, while wind power would need to grow by 16% a year.
“To put this in context, last year’s year-on-year growth was 25% for solar and 14% for wind, so almost exactly what is needed,” said Wiatros-Motyka. “Rapid growth in solar and wind has so far kept pace with pathways aligned with 1.5C. But to keep up these high growth rates throughout this decade, countries need to deploy bigger and faster.”
Fossil fuels were also kept at bay by a global slowdown in the world’s growing demand for electricity, according to the report. It found that global electricity demand rose by 0.4% in the first half of 2023 compared with the same period last year, well below the 10-year average of 2.6% before that.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/05/global-carbon-emissions-electricity-peak-thinktank-report
…you’d think that sort of thing might drive a point or two home even for the hard-of-thinking…but…you can’t tell them as won’t listen…even if you try to speak their language
“Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” is not standard scientific language, but these are not standard times, scientifically.
…& it might be tempting to just throw the tantrum-throwing babies out with the bathwater…just for a moment’s peace…but…even if it’s a dog’s life
[…fun fact…dogs are arguably the original cynics]
…cautious optimism…dogged pursuit of which can feel like a lot of wasted effort…is not without its rewards
A report last week by the International Energy Agency – a Paris-based body that was once known for underplaying the rise of renewable energy – makes a case that a change is happening, at least for some technology.
It’s worth a closer look, not least because fossil fuel backers often claim the IEA says the world needs more of what they’re selling. This report – an updated roadmap for how we could keep the global goal of limiting heating to 1.5C within reach – clearly does not say this.
As Carbon Brief has pointed out, it makes three main points. The first is that some important clean energy tech – solar energy, electric cars and battery production – is now being rolled out at a record pace, in line with what is needed to reach global net zero emissions by 2050. Under the IEA’s pathway to zero, solar and EVs could provide one-third of the global emissions cuts needed by 2030.
[…]
The IEA now says a concerted expansion of renewable energy could cut global demand for fossil fuels by 25% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. As a result, the world does not need new or extended coalmines, or coal plants that do not capture and store their emissions (and no power stations are meaningfully doing this).Crucially, in an Australian context, it also says there is no justification for approving new oil and gas developments. It argues that continued investment in some oil and gas projects that either already exist or have been approved is not inconsistent with the global net zero goal, but that the transition to clean energy must be carefully sequenced to ensure there is enough energy to avoid price spikes, but not so much that there is a glut of supply.
If properly handled, the IEA expects this would translate to a significant decline in the global gas supply – a 20% drop by 2030 and a nearly 50% cut by 2035.
The implications of this are pretty clear, if not politically popular.
…makes you wonder if “politically popular” might not be all it’s cracked up to be…but then “populist” has ever been a misnomer…so that probably ought not to come as a surprise either
New fossil fuel developments should not be approved without factoring in global climate goals. And governments will need to take a more interventionist role and make science-based calls about which energy projects should go ahead.
…& I’m sure that texas two-step won’t waltz on by to keep insisting there’s no ice below the waterline & unsinkable egotism is all any of us need
Given the evidence, anything less might be described as bananas.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2023/oct/05/global-heating-weather-temperatures-climate-impact
…sometimes, though…even an agnostic can thank heaven for small mercies
Starbucks develops coffee seeds that can withstand climate change effects [Guardian]
…so…hope springs eternal…or at least “lives to fight another day“?
Rip, are you being a little ray of sunshine today?😉😄
This one just fits with your “folks not believing/liking science anymore” and the other TMBG song;
Here Comes Science is a pretty great whole album, tbh!
This one has been a favorite of mine, since that album came out:
In the last two major votes the Democratic side of the aisle showed they could cohere and drive change in the face of GOP dysfunction.
And of course with similarly slim margins in the majority they were able to pass legislation. Even with a slim margin facing GOP control of the Senate and Trump in the White House Democrats were able to get all of the must pass spending bills passed and enacted.
…they also demonstrated pretty neatly that the hastert rule is as binding as you said…& that not following it on kevin’s part would…as was blindingly obvious…go exactly the way they did for him
…gaetz…not so much…as yet, at any rate
…but in terms of doing its job of keeping the whip firmly in hands that love to exact punishment but get nobody any closer to the product of a functional government…neither of those superficially contradictory outcomes actually subverts anything to an extent that moves the needle it was always designed to keep stuck where they like it?
The problem for McCarthy is that if he had committed from the beginning to genuine give and take and fair play, he’d still be here.
Instead he flip flopped from ironclad defense of the Hastert “rule” and then broke it and then flip flopped right back.
Even if he held just 25% of his caucus on a path of essentially business as usual, he would have been in position to tell dissenters to get lost. Instead he tried to hold 100% and couldn’t tell them anything.
…we’ll never know…could just as easily have been the case where getting even 1 in 4 of his ducks in a row reliably was more than he could achieve & he’d simply have got the same ending quicker by letting them hit fast forward to where we are now
…counter-factuals are fun & all…but they’re called that for a reason?
Sure, but then it becomes a case of evaluating scenarios and gaming them out. McCarthy held the single biggest pot of campaign cash in the GOP caucus, and had the ear of all kinds of lobbyists and PACs with even more. He also had the benefit of his opposition being absolutely loathed by many in his caucus. Pulling together a coalition caucus was an option.
The net result may have gutted his party, but we have undoubtable evidence that the path he chose did gut the party.
When evaluating scenarios for alternative outcomes, in some cases historians struggle, like whether FDR should have pushed harder for early US intervention in WW2. The path he did follow had a mix of positive and negative outcomes, and it’s hard to judge whether it would have been better to mobilize sooner.
McCarthy just screwed up. He failed in a historic way. Historians have no problem looking at policies like the ones in Tuchman’s The March of Folly and saying “Nope. Not that.”
And one of the interesting points Tuchman makes is that if you’re going to fail, fail early before the sunk cost fallacy takes hold. McCarthy made the ultimate mistake of stringing out his failure too long. He knew going into the first vote in January that unity was impossible. He would either need to reach across the aisle early in a planned way, or late at the mercy of events. He made the wrong choice.
…you lost me at “then”…surely you were already well down the rabbit hole of “evaluating scenarios and gaming them out” well before the comment you’re replying to showed up…I lost count of the number of times you’ve bemoaned the fact the the man wasn’t following any of the trajectories that gamed out to a better conclusion when you evaluated the scenario in your head…of which this is a decently representative re-tread
…but it still runs into that counter-factual brick-wall…so…presumably there needs to be a broader object to the exercise…figuring out how to nudge real people to act in ways that don’t constitute failure modes in terms of the output, for example…& realistically the only kind of coalition caucus that would actually result in a meaningful mitigation of the obstructionist agenda that pretty much just gets remixed by every single one of the people seated on his side of the aisle in that chamber…not least the man himself…would be essentially a democratic one in a nominally-republican led chamber…which…sure…if by some miracle he could have achieved in any way that could have stuck long enough to get anything passed…could have gifted them all manner of legitimate goods that they could campaign on trying to borrow credit for…but based on what passes for the form guide for the runners & riders…more likely just makes the circles the whole thing would have gone in tighter than the ones they ultimately did
…it’s like the thing renton says about smack addicts in trainspotting…who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin…those people don’t want a speaker…they want a dealer & they need their fix…& they increasingly don’t give any indication that they give a solitary flying fuck how it’s dressed up or how many times it requires them to contradict themselves, each other & everybody else to get it
…it’s potentially instructive to contemplate how things might have turned out…& it can make a good read…but harris’ fatherland or philip k dick’s man in the high castle are probably better attempts at WWII counter-factuals than either of us could pull off even with assistance…& they probably don’t offer a lot of comfort to the sort of people sassoon had in mind when he spoke of “the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficienct imagination to realise” in an attempt to “protest against the deception which is being practiced on them”
…historians have it easy…they’ve got the benefit of hindsight, complete control of which bits they bother to include & a decent chance almost nobody has the time or resources to spot the stitches on account of the demands of the present…in which people like maccarthy get to occupy institutions that let them get their hands on the levers of power the way their voters never will…& which from an internal perspective they get to see up close in ways we can barely speculate meaningfully about…find that their “best option” is routinely broadly synonymous with our “worst case scenario”…& as the fateful 8 that served him up on a platter to a giant ambulatory forehead that apparently has a sucking void behind it exemplify…most of them are little but two-dimensional ciphers that arguably deserve to be the kind of grist to the mill they in fact are
…so what do we gain by giving kevin the coulda-woulda-shoulda treatment about things he made abundantly clear he filed under never-gonna…before, during and particularly after the point where it might have made a difference…moreover…what does that have that just talking about a hypothetical speaker we’d be free to add or subtract any & all flaws or virtues to & what a better job they’d have made of it & then holding that up to make kevin look just as big of an ass by comparison…to me the only noticeable difference between that pairing is that the latter does him less favors & might engender something more broadly applicable than the version that folds a bunch of specifics into an equal quantity of speculation?
…which is great if you want material for when we attend the intervention for the speaker that was…but…to pick another real life example that looms in a more pleasing manner…how does that help fetterman get to sign off on a budget he’s happy with…because that’s the sort of question we could really use some insight into about now?
Yeah, IMO there’s no “there” there because even the reasonable (and that probably needs quotes, italics, superscript and like four other textual treatments to properly show my dripping sarcasm) Republicans are not particularly interested in governing under even favorable circumstances, let alone the current one-house and no executive branch situation.
Part of the dark comedy is that McCarthy WAS Matt Gaetz a generation of leadership ago, throwing bombs and pledging to gum up the works if Obama didn’t admit he was Kenyan and make hunting Mexican immigrants legal in California or whatever. It matters not that none of this is widely popular; that’s what the judicary is for. Everything else needs to come to a halt. To paraphrase Serwer’s famous line: “The inaction is the point.”
Edit to add: There are some real fascinating parallels between McCarthy and DeSantis right now. They both are leaning into “But I did the job!” and not quite realizing that what their base wants is for them to burn it down.
The issue is not about some kind of time machine magic — of course you can’t go back in time and make McCarthy not screw up.
But there is a lot of value in breaking the framework of thinking that certain things have to have turned out a certain way. McCarthy didn’t get there alone, he had a lot of enablers, including in the press, who reinforced the moronic, ahistorical framework that he had no choice but to go with a unified caucus.
It’s not how things have worked in the House in recent times, it’s not even how things work in the Senate.
The more you can break that kind of thinking, the better. We are stuck right now with a crazy amount of simplistic, deterministic, mechanical thinking which reinforces the worst instincts of bad people. And when alternative paths exist, the sooner people can start thinking about them, the more likely they’ll be taken after one failure instead of what’s happening now, which is it takes ten faceplants.
A good example of what should be happening now is this dunking by reporter Dave Weigel on fellow reporter Josh Kraushaar.
https://nitter.net/daveweigel/status/1709637656580166038
Kraushaar, along with Jake Sherman, are two of the most read Hill journalists around, and their newsletters are generally considered the top agenda setting outlets around.
They’ve also been hopeless info mules and enablers for McCarthy, as Weigel points out, and it’s made them laughingstocks in the wake of McCarthy’s collapse. If they had avoided building the bubble around McCarthy from the outset, it’s more likely he would have broken sooner.
And while that would still be an outside chance, there could well have been less unforced antagonism toward Democrats, fewer pointless indulgences of the paranoid nuts in his caucus, and smaller things that would have been beneficial for the country.
There are no magic bullets, but what can happen is chipping away at the dumb frameworks about how things “really” work in DC. Hacks like Kraushaar and Sherman should be mocked. We’re fortunately seeing a lot more pushback on GOP punditry trying to spin that McCarthy’s fall is somehow the Democrats’ fault, and further erosion of Murc’s Law can only be a good thing.
The point is not to somehow magically fix what has already happened, but to start shrinking the influence of hacks like Kraushaar and get more momentum for earlier honest debate instead of gullible acceptance of how things must be.
…just once I’d love for you to answer a question I ask in a way that suggests you actually understood it…it would be a massive boon in terms of trying to figure out what you think you’re engaged in all the times you don’t
…particularly when those almost invariably involve you telling me what “the” point is as though somehow you’re the final arbiter & points work with same rules as highlander
…it comes off as though you equate having the last word with being right about something even if it requires you to be spectacularly obtuse…&…while some days I may have the time & be strange enough to consider getting to the bottom of that sort of bizarre phenomenon a recreational pursuit…more often I don’t…so that stuff just sits there looking oddly pleased with itself for reasons that have a lot in common with a girlfriend I wouldn’t know from out of state…& the whole thing is getting old for more people than just me…to the point where it’s been suggested the problem is that I’m too polite about it
I think this was the inevitable outcome based on the devil’s deal he made to become speaker. It precluded his ability to do any of that and keep the gavel.
Funny how a guy from a think tank heavily funded by the Kochs and regularly rounded up by Fox to back their anti-science agenda doesn’t bring up the Kochs or Murdoch.
Why, this stuff just happens!
Let’s bring up just one of his colleagues at AEI — John “Mary” Lott, the supposed expert on guns who has been routinely debunked and exposed as engaging in crooked use of data, and notoriously created the sock puppet “Mary Rosh” to defend himself online. Lott has been trotted out countless times in Murdoch Media to attack mainstream scientific research on guns, but also endless other subjects under the sun not even remotely connected to his supposed area of expertise. And he is just one of a cadre of reactionary PhDs used by Murdich to attack actual science.
Let’s talk about how the Kochs have spent uncountable tens of millions to attack climate science, an effort which continues today. And it’s important to stress how many levels this operates on from funding indefensibly bad academic studies to PR campaigns all the way to private investigators harassing Jane Mayer.
For almost a decade of GOP control of Congress — control bankrolled by the Kochs and driven by Murdoch — no GOP chair authorized climate hearings at all. And when Democrats took control and held hearings, the GOP anti-science testimony was drawn from Koch-funded sources.
And that doesn’t even begin to talk about how other execs pushed anti-science agendas.
And to be clear, this is not simply a case of trying to pollute the debate with misleading facts. They are funding a deliberately anti-science agenda which attacks the very nature of science — anti-evolution quacks.
It’s critical to note that Mills’ erasure of the role of the Kochs and the Murdochs isn’t an accident. It’s a deliberate PR move to whitewash what is really happening. It’s equivalent of reporting which claims people shot by police somehow had their wounds caused by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I’d add that Times Opinion section editors aren’t naive. They know how this kind of PR operates. There are much more responsible writers about the overwhelming role of the right — including his own institution — in assailing the foundations of science. They chose the guy who covers it up.
One of the running bits from the NY Times Pitchbot account is along the lines of “Science shows Covid vaccines are safe and effective. But what if they weren’t?”
What Doug J Balloon is parodying is not just the stupidity of a single piece, but the entire editorial mindset which is addicted to promoting these hack takes.
So in this case, I could have saved some typing by just pitchbotting it as “Our own news reporters have provided endless evidence that anti-science agendas are driven by the right. But let’s pretend they didn’t”
…at the other end of that see saw, though…you never know what you can find if you poke about in the product
…aside from…if we’re feeling charitable…at least enough paragraphs that could be diced up for parts to be able to make some statements that would actually be at home in a piece that lived up to its headline…in click-through internet degrees of separation…the headline alone gets you to at least a mention of “negative partisanship”…& although you’d most likely have a similar reaction to the piece by one of his colleagues in an NYT sense that that leads to in the first instance…a couple more would get you to a full .pdf of a fairly interesting paper on Enemy Construction and the Press that ought to be right up your alley
…speaking for myself…I don’t spend a lot of time delving into things that have a use for the term “schmittian exceptionalism” on account of the guy being kind of a prick & a nazi to boot…even if he was a “notable jurist”…but then goebbels was all kinds of a monstrous asshole & it didn’t stop him being right about enough stuff that it can sometimes seem like half the global economy follows his playbook
…it’s what you do with it that counts?
Here’s a little good news…
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/this-startup-has-a-weapon-of-pfas-destruction-that-fits-inside-a-10-foot-shipping-container/
Ladies & gentlemen, your next speaker?
https://www.meidastouch.com/news/republican-senator-says-matt-gaetz-bragged-about-snorting-erectile-dysfunction-medication
@SplinterRip I just wanted to say that I appreciate all your hard work putting the DOTs together. At the risk of repeating myself, you are my favorite news aggregator. I’m grateful for your insights and feel smarter for having heard them.
…well…as far as feeling any smarter by the time we get to the comments…at least that makes one of us?
…needless to say you’re welcome…but I will admit that knowing how widely the results on any given day compare & contrast to the several dozen other permutations & combinations of this or that thing that seems to be on hand…or even just the stuff that hides wherever I’ve used an ellipsis to skip something in what I’m only too aware is an attempt at brevity no reasonable person is liable to believe I ever engage in…tends to make me feel my efforts might not measure up to that kind of praise
…then again…maybe with enough practice I’ll even learn how to take a compliment gracefully one of these days…so…thank you
There are lots of good links, and I’m glad to see more Jamelle Bouie recently. He’s a bright spot in a largely dreary paper.
Things that make him stand out are his originality and willingness to do his own research and analysis. He succeeds where most fail because he actually engages with other points of view, instead of paying lip service to the idea. But he’s also far too smart to settle for the notion that a marketplace of ideas should somehow exist without judging competitors and holding them, rigorously, to account.
It’s a similar perspective of other smart writers like Adam Serwer, Osita Nwanevu, and Wesley Lowery, and this interview with Lowery addresses how it is driven, in part, by the fact that they’re African American thinkers.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/wesley-lowery-talks-about-being-black-in-the-newsroom-and-the-myth-of-objectivity.html
There’s an awareness of double standards and duplicity of messaging, and what’s more they synthesize that awareness with an intellectually rigorous approach that hackish right wing and status quo writers fear and reject.
Unfortunately, public discourse crowds out voices like theirs, often trying to just downgrade them to meaningless categories like African American writers, a slot to be filled along with a slot for a conservative woman, a slot for a Republican anti-Trumper, a slot for a pro-Trumper, maybe a token Asian writer….
It ignores how much of what they write is also driven by their reporting and analytical skill. The world is actually filled with good, analytical writers, and it’s a shame the editors and execs push back so often against letting them compete. Their products would be better for it. Mush really doesn’t sell.
…given that I just pinball my way past things that have caught my eye one way or another three times a week in a vague effort to wind up with something other than a pile of links barfed up like so many non-sequiturs I couldn’t keep down…this seems like as good a place as any to point out that the clue is in the name…so anytime you feel like offering up something any of those people have to say so it’s not as hard as you paint it for the rest of us to find among the morass…the thread is, as ever, open
…whether or not public discourse drowns them out…I’m pretty sure they’d float just fine any time that suits hereabouts
…meanwhile…you’ve inspired me to discover that some fool in pittsburgh thinks mush “is a word created by one of my friends to describe the facial expression and feeling of embarrassment and excitement”…whereas…as any fool knows
https://www.saintsweb.co.uk/topic/15502-mush/
…& of the available options…I guess the first one that comes to mind for this fool is the mouth one…which ironically enough sells a lot of papers in addition to being something I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear around the fleet street mob
This is a fun one:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lets-talk-about-podiumgate
As Marshall says, it gets crazier than just spending more than a bunch of Arkansas tax dollars on a podium.
He also brings up a couple of good points. This is one:
The other is that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is making a lot of people really sick of her who could be her allies. It’s an exploitable weakness of the GOP in general — drive down turnout and donations, and saddle less dumb Republicans with the burden of defending them instead of attacking Democrats. Just like McCarthy, there are times when Democrats should look for ways to increase the fractures.
…yeah…I’ve been seeing that bob up in a variety of spots for a while off & on…for me the funniest bit so far is that when pressed she appears to have grudgingly offered up this $19k+ podium of hers & somehow seemed surprised to discover that a lot of people found it very hard to tell apart from the one they could have bought her for a little over 700 bucks with free delivery on account of their prime membership & suggesting maybe she could return hers for a refund & just use amazon
You’re my 21st century Walter Cronkite.
…that’s definitely a step up from the howard beale knock off I generally assume I wind up looking like most days
…which is much appreciated…not unlike your good self…or your bad self if you happen to be feeling frisky?