Welcome to the weekend gang! I guess we are on a break until Monday.
House reconvenes for 14th attempt to nominate a speaker
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/06/house-speaker-spectacle-continues-mccarthy-faces-fourth-day-voting
Whoa
Extradition of ‘El Chapo’ son to the US halted after 29 killed in arrest operation
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/americas/el-chapo-son-arrest-mexico-prison-intl/index.html
#merica
Six-year-old intentionally shot teacher in Virginia school, police say
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/06/virginia-school-student-shot-teacher
Sprots!
Damar Hamlin’s breathing tube is out and he told team, ‘Love you boys,’ via video, Buffalo Bills say
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/sport/damar-hamlin-collapse-bills-status-friday/index.html
Stonks!
Stocks stage first big rally of 2023 as hope grows that inflation will ease, Dow closes up 700 points
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/05/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html
This is crazy
Have a great weekend!
i dont know whats going on in that mcarthy video
but i do like the part where he doubles back to mouth off with all his bodyguards in front of him
…how long he gets to keep it is anybody’s guess…but round 15 went his way after enough of the howler monkey brigade shifted to voting “present”…seems like they thought the 14th time was the charm but gaetz borked that up for an extra bit of hey-look-at-me by keeping mum when they called him so he could fuck it up at the last minute…although it seemed like by then they’d about run out of concessions to demand?
…the whole mess seems like it presages nothing good…haven’t actually checked the rules package they settled on but the shitshow component has a decent chance of being in ain’t-seen nothing yet territory?
…meanwhile…not that I particularly needed another reason to think katie porter is great…but
I think one of the concessions is that the House be provided with every bill at least 72 hours before it is voted on. This apparently has been resisted for decades by both parties so you get these multi-thousand-page omnibus spending bills and the voting starts almost immediately. This gives the members just enough time to ensure that their own pork and waste and very strange, very localized concerns made it in, but nothing else. I think that’s an excellent idea, although I’m sure the lobbyists will get the same 72-hour window and they’ll be running from office to office to explain to anyone who will
take their cashlisten why a yea or a nay vote is absolutely crucial.Since this is basically operating on the logic of the Soviet Communists, the next step is going to be empowering the most radical faction to go after the less radical faction. The goal will be to cow the majority, who is already feeling weak and unsupported, and then isolate any dissenters and eliminate them, using the levers of power they’ve now gained to destroy regular order.
One of the critical things they need to do to achieve this is reframe the situation to con outsiders into believing this is far more settled than it really is. They need people to forget how slim their majority is.
One method will be to draw as much attention to the House and suck the oxygen out of news for any other part of government which is actually functioning. They’ll need all of the captive media they can get on their side for this. We’ll see stupid claims that somehow the narrowness of their numbers is actually a sign of their strength.
There will be people outside of the cult who won’t buy in at all. The extremists will also need to gaslight a lot of people into believing they are operating on rational principles, and that there is value in negotiating and making concessions in the hope of some future payout. A payout that any rational person can see they will never honor.
They can be broken. But it will take a willingness to understand how bad they are at their cores and how much distance there is between what they say and what they want. And it will take a willingness to use the extensive opportunities to crush them in a leveraged, consistent way. That’s going to be the hard part — their opponents are still too reluctant to work that way. But it’s getting better.
…there’s also the part where they aim to play the same sort of silly-buggers as the MAGA contingent have with stuff like discovery in the various cases against tangerine palpatine only with committees & classified information…by once again doing the thing they claim to be trying to prevent
This another area where I’m sure McCarthy had no objection at all to the substance. I think he was only concerned that these bozos will screw up the optics and that will reflect badly on the party overall and hurt fundraising.
The big risk I think is they will immunize a bunch of witnesses and lead them to reveal and contradict evidence, and throw monkey wrenches into prosecutions.
…I don’t doubt their sole purpose is to warp the outcome of investigations &/or pass classified information to people who shouldn’t have access to it
…but like cousin matt mentioned about the 72hr thing I don’t know that splitting the budget bills out into individual elements is necessarily a bad thing even if they want to do for shitty reasons
…matching new spending with cuts is out & out appeal-to-the-base-counterfactual-bullshit…& the stuff about causing a wholesale shutdown sooner than increase the debt ceiling might be the kind of preaching their choir likes singing along with…but it’s not even in their own interests beyond the short term…so with any luck it’ll burn them by the time the ballot boxes get rolled out for ’24?
Photographer’s name tracks. (See also: below.)
I’ve felled(? I guess not enough to know the proper term) a few trees, none near that big or that eloquently (not sure if that only applies to words but it’s what my up all night brain though if) placed. Did have one curl right around a trailer and lay right on the ground like I knew what I was doing (I did, but not too that degree ).
Also, can everyone assume that I star their posts, every one, everytime. The site signs me out whenever I leave (not complaining in the least) and I am apparently quite lazy on occasion so I mentally atar every comment but don’t always physically. I value this community tremendously.
i actually star very few comments..asides from the duans where i star everything i listened to
i probably overthink shit… but for the dots i tend to only star things where i know what the comments talking about and have an opininion of my own……which largely excludes anything american politics
coz lifes too short to be invested in anothers countries bullshit
You have a better memory than me. I generally star everything I read so that when I return to the page, I know which comments I’ve already read. If not I’m like a goldfish swimming in circles through the DS comments.
Same. Starring helps me move to the new additions quickly. I will note that I don’t star links until I’ve had a chance to check them out. And if it’s paywalled, I may not star that because I can’t see it.
You’re a more cautious starrer than I.
Stars are weird to me. Essentially, I feel like a star means “I approved this message.” But some things don’t fall into that category (My coatimundi died. Star that? I’m … not sure if that means that I hate coatimundis or even diurnal mammals in general. It might. But I haven’t met any so I really shouldn’t malign South and Central American arboreal animals. But I do hate squirrels because they are assholes. GODDAMMIT DO I STAR THIS)
So I try to read links before I star them because sometimes people link to assholes like squirrels. But if I didn’t star it that doesn’t mean I think it’s an asshole link, it may mean I didn’t have time to read it.
STARS LACK NUANCE IS WHAT I’M SAYING
…this…so much this, as the kids may or may not still say
…once upon a distant star in the kinjaverse I think I treated them very differently…but back when this was a new place I got in the habit of starring more or less everything more or less in lieu of another way of saying “appreciate you taking the time to say something & figured I’d let you know someone noticed that you had”…&…the habit mostly stuck…at times it might be with some emphasis or nuance it flatly cannot support…sometimes it’s just that…sometimes, if I’m entirely honest, I might lurk a thread if I know I probably ought to be doing something else…like not spending all the hours I could be asleep going down DUAN-inspired rabbit holes…but if I feel like admitting I’m trying to keep an eye out on the off chance someone might have something to add then I’m pretty profligate with the star button
…for the most part I do try to abide by a similar rule of thumb on the links thing, though
The fact that McCarthy chose to bargain with the lunatic fringe ishis party instead of the Democrats tells you all you need to know about the next two years.
I give it about two weeks before Boebert or Gaetz trigger a recall vote, and they’ll keep doing it every two weeks just because they can.
Oh, yeah. And honestly, two weeks is probably a generous estimate. The good news is that triggering these stupid votes keeps them from fucking things up. So the fact that they’ve wasted a week already is actually a positive step for democracy in general.
Is it possible that, like Trump, the British Royal Family is not nearly as wealthy as one would imagine? From your Deadsplinter Royal Correspondent:
Hazza, I think it was more not having enough dosh for one more mouth to feed (and clothe, and accessorize, and fly around the world promoting green causes.) If we go back a generation and say, “OK, who was the spouse of the second son and did the Queen fear she would be overshadowed by this woman?” That woman would have been Sarah Ferguson, second (and best-loved) son Andrew’s (now ex-, kind of) wife. I’m guessing troubling thoughts along those lines did not keep Her Maj up at night.
…there’s a whole messy business where the royals give the exchequer the proceeds of the crown estates each year & then get granted a ton of it back directly & indirectly in a way that sort of looks like they pay tax…so “not enough money” in that context probably translates more to “it’ll be an absolute PITA to re-jig the finances & if we don’t do that some other member(s) of the firm would have their purse-strings tightened which is a whole other headache I don’t want to have to deal with”?
…so…probably less like trump than the house of saud would be my guess…but it’s very much a guess
…got to imagine his brother wouldn’t go for splitting the duchy of cornwall’s takings, for example…though you’d think that could cover the costs of both heir & spare plus their respective dependents…it ran to 20-some-million quid in ’21-’22?
I remember when Sarah Ferguson appeared in commercials for a mall chain here. I was like huh guess she doesn’t have that much money after all.
In which the Princess of Wales’s hormones are discussed: FROM YOUR DEADSPLINTER ROYAL CORRESPONDENT: