I’m going to try to be upbeat today, although I will still have to include Trump-related stories. I can’t handle the war news today, though.
I’ll begin with a post by Simon Rosenberg, who is a very optimistic political commentator. He was one of the few poll-watchers who predicted the Democratic sweep in the 2022 midterms.
According to Wikipedia, Rosenberg is “founder of New Democrat Network and the New Policy Institute, a liberal think tank and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.” He publishes at his website, Hopium Chronicles. You may have seen him on MSNBC last night.
Consumer sentiment has risen sharply in recent weeks, and measures of life, job and income satisfaction are remarkably high. There is no doubt that recent years have been hard — Covid, an insurrection at the Capitol, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, repeated OPEC price hikes, global and domestic inflation — but it is increasingly clear that America is getting to the other side of this challenging period, and are in a far better place than when President Biden took office.
And the Democratic party is historically strong.
Second, the strength of the president’s record is only matched by the strength of his party. I don’t think it is widely understood how strong the Democratic Party is right now. The party has won more votes in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party has done in modern American history. Over the last four presidential elections, Democrats have averaged 51% of the popular vote, their best showing over four national elections since the 1930s.
In both 2022 and 2023, Democrats prevented the historical down ballot struggle of the party in power and had two remarkably successful elections. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats’ statewide margins were greater than the 2020 presidential margins in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania — all recent battleground states. That showing led the party to pick up a Senate seat, four state legislative chambers and two governorships, and helped keep the House of Representatives close, making it far more likely Republicans lose it in 2024.
What was visible of fog-bound Boston from the air yesterday, 12-26-2023
While in 2022, Republicans could point to gains in New York and California to offset their losses in the battleground states, there were no places in 2023 where they outperformed expectations. A blue wave washed across the U.S. in 2023, and this ongoing strong performance of the Democratic Party in election after election, in all parts of the country, should fill Biden’s supporters with confidence.
Finally, while Democrats keep winning, conventional wisdom continues to overly discount Trump’s historic baggage and MAGA’s repeated electoral failures. Despite these repeated failures, Republicans are on the cusp of nominating Trump again, who this time is an even more degraded and dangerous version of MAGA than he was in 2020.
I hope you’ll read the rest at the MSNBC link. It’s well worth your time.
The Democratic-aligned House Majority PAC is putting down $5.2 million in initial reservations for TV and digital ads to try to win the House special election to replace the expelled Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., the group told NBC News.
The group said it will spend $3.7 million on TV and $1.5 million on digital platforms, along with $700,000 on mail ads, in the weeks ahead of the Feb. 13 contest in New York’s 3rd Congressional District. The election pits Democrat Tom Suozzi, a former congressman eying a comeback, against Republican nominee Mazi Melesa Pilip, a Nassau County legislator.
The competitive district, which includes parts of Long Island and Queens, voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 before it elected Santos in 2022. But his subsequently unearthed biographical fabrications and sweeping federal indictment prompted the House to expel him on Dec. 1. It is the type of district that will be heavily contested next November, and it could determine which party wins the chamber, which Republicans now narrowly control.
The contest “represents the first step to Democrats taking back the House in 2024,” House Majority PAC President Mike Smith said in response to written questions. “A resurgence in New York represents House Democrats’ best path to the majority.”
The Make Way for Ducklings statues in Christmas attire.
Lauren Boebert is facing a brutal and very expensive reelection fight in 2024.
Adam Frisch, the main Democratic challenger to the lightning-rod Republican congresswoman from Colorado’s 3rd District, has been raking in jaw-dropping amounts of campaign cash.
According to the Federal Election Commission, Frisch’s campaign has raised over $7.7 million so far, making him one of the top fundraisers in the 2024 House races. As spotted by the Time reporter Mini Racker, that’s enough to put him behind Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy and the Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries in total funds raised.
Frisch came close to unseating Boebert in 2022, falling short by just 546 votes in what was considered a safe Republican district. That electoral performance was before the litany of controversies that have made Boebert a tabloid favorite, including a scandal this summer when she was booted from a Denver theater after vaping and groping her date during a performance of “Beetlejuice.”
Boebert has raised $2.4 million for her campaign this cycle. The money gap becomes even starker when you compare totals for just the third quarter, July 1 to September 30, the latest reporting period available from the FEC: Frisch pulled in $3.4 million, while Boebert managed just $854,000.
There’s a chance Frisch’s fundraising may not even be used against Boebert. She’s facing a substantial primary challenge from the Republican attorney Jeff Hurd, who raised over $412,000 in the third quarter, though his campaign launched only in August.
One of the Republicans in Michigan who acted as a fake elector for Donald J. Trump expressed deep regret about his participation, according to a recording of his interview with the state attorney general’s office that was obtained by The New York Times.
The elector, James Renner, is thus far the only Trump elector who has reached an agreement with the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, which brought criminal charges in July against all 16 of the state’s fake Trump electors. In October, Ms. Nessel’s office dropped all charges against Mr. Renner after he agreed to cooperate.
Newbury Street (a downtown shopping district) on Christmas
Mr. Renner, 77, was a late substitution to the roster of electors in December 2020 after two others dropped out. He told the attorney general’s office that he later realized, after reviewing testimony from the House investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that he and other electors had acted improperly.
“I can’t overemphasize how once I read the information in the J6 transcripts how upset I was that the legitimate process had not been followed,” he said in the interview. “I felt that I had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.”
Charges have now been brought against fake electors in three states — Georgia, Michigan and Nevada — and investigations are underway in other states, including Arizona and New Mexico. In Georgia, prosecutors in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, have looked far beyond the electors themselves and charged Mr. Trump, the former president, and many of his key allies over their efforts to keep him in power despite his loss in 2020. Mr. Trump also faces charges over election interference from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In Michigan, Ms. Nessel, a Democrat, has only charged the electors, but has said her investigation is still open. During their interview of Mr. Renner, her investigators asked about a number of other people involved, including Shawn Flynn, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign on the ground in Michigan, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer. (Mr. Giuliani is among those charged in Georgia; both he and Mr. Trump have pleaded not guilty.)
In criminal and civil cases across the country this month, judges have issued critical opinions chipping away at Trump’s attempt to shield himself. Their rulings are leaving him exposed to potential prison time and massive financial penalties, potentially ruining his 2024 re-election campaign and destroying the billionaire’s famed wealth.
And the most definitive answer could be just weeks away.
The question is seemingly simple: Can an American president commit crimes while in office without ever facing criminal charges?
“It’s kind of ridiculous,” said Paul Saputo, a Texas defense lawyer. “We’re not even going to have a 5-4 decision. I don’t think it’s going to be a close call. They realize that in order for them to really keep the country together, it’s got to be pretty unanimous.”
The growing consensus by legal scholars is that the Supreme Court will lean conservative—in the traditional American sense, not a political one—starkly setting limits on executive power that will leave Trump in the cold. And that’s despite the liberal public’s concerns that Trump will benefit from the current roster at the nation’s highest court, where a third of the nine justices were appointed by the man himself.
Recent general-election polling has generally shown Donald Trump maintaining a slight lead over President Biden. Yet many of those polls also reveal an Achilles’ heel for Mr. Trump that has the potential to change the shape of the race.
It relates to Mr. Trump’s legal troubles: If he is criminally convicted by a jury of his peers, voters say they are likely to punish him for it.
A trial on criminal charges is not guaranteed, and if there is a trial, neither is a conviction. But if Mr. Trump is tried and convicted, a mountain of public opinion data suggests voters would turn away from the former president.
Still likely to be completed before Election Day remains the special counsel Jack Smith’s federal prosecution of Mr. Trump for allegedly scheming to overturn the 2020 election. That trial had been set to start on March 4, 2024, but that date has been put on hold, pending appellate review of the trial court’s rejection of Mr. Trump‘s presidential immunity. On Friday the Supreme Court declined Mr. Smith’s request for immediate review of the question, but the appeal is still headed to the high court on a rocket docket. That is because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear oral argument on Jan. 9 and will probably issue a decision within days of that, setting up a prompt return to the Supreme Court. Moreover, with three other criminal cases also set for trial in 2024, it is entirely possible that Mr. Trump will have at least one criminal conviction before November 2024.
“Jingle Bells Composed Here”
The authors look at the polls:
The negative impact of conviction has emerged in polling as a consistent through line over the past six months nationally and in key states. We are not aware of a poll that offers evidence to the contrary. The swing in this data away from Mr. Trump varies — but in a close election, as 2024 promises to be, any movement can be decisive.
To be clear, we should always be cautious of polls this early in the race posing hypothetical questions, about conviction or anything else. Voters can know only what they think they will think about something that has yet to happen.
Yet we have seen the effect in several national surveys, like a recent Wall Street Journal poll. In a hypothetical matchup between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump leads by four percentage points. But if Mr. Trump is convicted, there is a five-point swing, putting Mr. Biden ahead, 47 percent to 46 percent.
In another new poll by Yahoo News and YouGov, the swing is seven points. In a December New York Times/Siena College poll, almost a third of Republican primary voters believe that Mr. Trump shouldn’t be the party’s nominee if he is convicted even after winning the primary.
The damage to Mr. Trump is even more pronounced when we look at an important subgroup: swing-state voters. In recent CNN polls from Michigan and Georgia, Mr. Trump holds solid leads. The polls don’t report head-to-head numbers if Mr. Trump is convicted, but if he is, 46 percent of voters in Michigan and 47 percent in Georgia agree that he should be disqualified from the presidency.
Those are often places where a greater number of conflicted — and therefore persuadable — voters reside. An October Times/Siena poll shows that voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania favored Mr. Trump, with Mr. Biden narrowly winning Wisconsin. But if Mr. Trump is convicted and sentenced, Mr. Biden would win each of these states, according to the poll. In fact, the poll found the race in these six states would seismically shift in the aggregate: a 14-point swing, with Mr. Biden winning by 10 rather than losing by four percentage points.
There’s more interesting number crunching at the NYT link.
An Indiana man who crashed his truck and had been trapped inside it for nearly a week was found alive on Tuesday by two fishermen who happened to spot the wrecked vehicle.
The fishermen – Nivardo Delatorre and his father-in-law Mario Garcia – noticed the crashed truck under an overpass on Interstate 94 as they were walking along Salt Creek in Portage, Indiana, looking for fishing holes. They initially believed they had seen a dead person inside the vehicle until one of them touched the body and the man turned his head and spoke to them.
Christmas in Boston
“I went to touch it, and he turned around,” Garcia said at a press conference. “And it almost killed me there because it was kind of shocking.”
“He was alive, and he was very happy to see us — I’ve never seen a relief like that,” he added. “He says that he tried yelling and screaming, but nobody would hear him. It just was quiet, just the sound of the water.”
The two good Samaritans called 911 and first responders rushed to the scene at about 3:45 p.m. Tuesday. The driver told the fisherman he had been stranded and paralyzed in place since Dec. 20.
The driver, identified as 27-year-old Matthew Reum, was heading westbound on Interstate 94 when his truck left the roadway for unknown reasons, Indiana State Police said in a news release.
The vehicle was driven into a ditch before making it into a creek and stopping under the bridge. Reum was pinned inside the vehicle and was unable to reach his cellphone to call for help.
The Portage Fire Department and Burns Harbor Fire Department were able to cut Reum from the vehicle using heavy machinery. He was then flown to a hospital in critical condition for treatment of severe, life-threatening injuries.
I hope he recovers.
That’s all I have for you today. What stories are you following?
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Have you noticed that a good deal of Republican Politicians need some serious intervention and more than a few psychiatric evaluations? As part of my training to be a teacher at university, I was trained to spot issues and quickly send the individual off to the District’s psychologist. I can’t say I know what happens after you get diagnosed with, say, a significant personality disorder or two, but I do know how to recognize symptoms and get the person’s help. It was a massive effort in ’70s education colleges since School Districts could be held accountable for not diagnosing student needs and getting them help as soon as possible. Perhaps it’s time to introduce a similar methodology to aides, staff, and those working daily with Republican officeholders. The amount of abnormal behavior screams at you from your television screen daily. I remember Nixon’s paranoia well, but it didn’t seem like a larger pattern in the party then.
Leave it to Ozzy.
All aboard Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay Crazy, but that’s how it goes Millions of people living as foes Maybe it’s not too late To learn how to love And forget how to hate Mental wounds not healing Life’s a bitter shame I’m going off the rails on a crazy train I’m going off the rails on a crazy train Let’s go
The Washington Monthly starts at the very head of the rotting fish. “Has Trump Gone Even Crazier? Forget parsing every Biden utterance. The likely GOP nominee is forgetting where he is, stumbling over words, and waxing full fascist.” This is written by James D. Zirin.
While neither Trump nor Biden projects John F. Kennedy’s vigor, Trump, 77, has been even more bizarre of late—doddering and disoriented in a new way.
Listen to what he has been saying lately.
He has repeatedly confused Biden and Obama, even calling Obama the current president. Doctors often ask stroke victims who is the current president to test mental acuity. We all misspeak. But put this in the context of many other indicia of cognitive decline.
Trump doesn’t know where he is. On the stump in Sioux City, Iowa, he said hello to Sioux Falls, which is in South Dakota. Okay, not that big a deal. Of course, his aides later said the teleprompter got it wrong. I wonder whether the aides are still in his employ. Perhaps they are moving boxes in Mar-a-Lago.
Misidentifying world leaders. He described Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom he admires, as the “great leader of Turkey.” Recep Tayyip Erdogan is authoritarian like Orban but with an Islamic hue rather than a Christian nationalist drag. Trump has said that Hungary shares a border with Russia. Seven countries border Hungary, but not Russia.
Referring to Kim Jong-Un, the hereditary dictator who rules North Korea, Trump said he was in charge of a country of 1.4 billion people, obviously confusing the Hermit Kingdom of 26 million with the Middle Kingdom of 1.4 billion.
But it’s not just misidentification. It’s the cadence and slurring of speech, too. Trump is having trouble with names. “On purpose” came out as “on perfect.” Adherents of Karl Marx came out as “markers,” not Marxists. He warned that Biden is drifting us into World War II.
Perhaps more worrisome than Trump’s mental miscues is the fact that his authoritarian tendencies have veered into even more fascistic territory, and his insults have become even more intemperate, which is saying something. (Recall that after the first 2016 presidential debate, he flogged Megyn Kelly with a reference to menstruation.) Special Counsel Jack Smith is “deranged.” While this might be understandable since Smith has indicted Trump in a Washington, D.C. federal court for using illegal means to overturn the 2020 election results and in Florida for mishandling classified documents, the bile has boiled over into invective against Smith’s wife and family, whom he insists “despise me much more than he does.”
Trump called Nancy Pelosi a “crazed lunatic” and continued to joke about the hammer assault on her 83-year-old husband, Paul, by a crazed, seemingly pro-Trump intruder who was convicted on multiple felony accounts on Thursday.
From bad to wurst. In a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire, Trump called his political enemies “vermin,” channeling the dehumanizing language of OG fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and arguing paradoxically—and paranoically—that the pests are also “radical left thugs” who pose a greater threat to the United States than Russia, China, or even North Korea. He promised to “root out” the vermin if he regained power.
And, if you dare call out the reference to vermin or blood as Hitlerian, his spokesman threatens that your “entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
Jewish and Latino groups, as well as an untold number of columnists, have condemned his statement that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” the kind of volk talk that sounded better in the original German.
Deranged people, as we all have learned, can be dangerous. While it can be hard to diagnose if the unhoused man who regularly yells at you at the street corner has just plateaued or will be given to a violent attack, Trump’s policy pronouncements have become more incendiary and more insane, if that were possible.
The list of policy pronouncements should have a chilling effect on any person who values the U.S. Constitution. But, crazy is at all levels of U.S. Federal and State Republican officials.
A shadow looms over the world. In this week’s edition we publish The World Ahead 2024, our 38th annual predictive guide to the coming year, and in all that time no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024. That a Trump victory next November is a coin-toss probability is beginning to sink in.
Mr Trump dominates the Republican primary. Several polls have him ahead of President Joe Biden in swing states. In one, for the New York Times, 59% of voters trusted him on the economy, compared with just 37% for Mr Biden. In the primaries, at least, civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions have only strengthened Mr Trump. For decades Democrats have relied on support among black and Hispanic voters, but a meaningful number are abandoning the party. In the next 12 months a stumble by either candidate could determine the race—and thus upend the world.
This is a perilous moment for a man like Mr Trump to be back knocking on the door of the Oval Office. Democracy is in trouble at home. Mr Trump’s claim to have won the election in 2020 was more than a lie: it was a cynical bet that he could manipulate and intimidate his compatriots, and it has worked. America also faces growing hostility abroad, challenged by Russia in Ukraine, by Iran and its allied militias in the Middle East and by China across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea. Those three countries loosely co-ordinate their efforts and share a vision of a new international order in which might is right and autocrats are secure.
Because maga Republicans have been planning his second term for months, Trump 2 would be more organised than Trump 1. True believers would occupy the most important positions. Mr Trump would be unbound in his pursuit of retribution, economic protectionism and theatrically extravagant deals. No wonder the prospect of a second Trump term fills the world’s parliaments and boardrooms with despair. But despair is not a plan. It is past time to impose order on anxiety.
The greatest threat Mr Trump poses is to his own country. Having won back power because of his election-denial in 2020, he would surely be affirmed in his gut feeling that only losers allow themselves to be bound by the norms, customs and self-sacrifice that make a nation. In pursuing his enemies, Mr Trump will wage war on any institution that stands in his way, including the courts and the Department of Justice.
This nutter is from Louisiana and believe me, the majority of us are super embarrassed by him. The YouTube below is about Representative Clay Higgin’s “Ghost Bus” comment to the Director of the FBI. Higgins evidently believes that January 6th was a false flag operation by the deep state in the Homeland Security Department. FBI Director Christopher Ray had to remind him that the FBI was not part of that Department.
Seeking leniency for a January 6 rioter charged with assaulting police, the Louisiana Republican congressman Clay Higgins – a former law enforcement officer himself – saluted the man’s “good character, faith and core principles”.
In video taken during the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, the rioter was seen to say: “It’s going to be violent and yes, if you are asking, ‘Is Ryan Nichols going to bring violence? Yes, Ryan Nichols is going to bring violence.’”
Nichols, in an affidavit, admitted posting the video, attacking officers with pepper spray and urging rioters on with shouts including, “This is not a peaceful protest”
In court in Washington last week, Nichols, of Longview, Texas, pleaded guilty to two charges: obstruction and assaulting, resisting or impeding police and obstruction of an official proceeding.
More than 1,000 arrests have been made over the attack and hundreds of convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy. Donald Trump, who incited the riot as he attempted to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat by Joe Biden, faces 17 charges related to his election subversion, four federal and 13 at state level in Georgia.
Nine deaths have been linked to the attack staged by the former president’s supporters, including law enforcement suicides.
Higgins’ own website describes him as having “spent much of his career dedicated to uniformed service [as] an army veteran and law enforcement officer”. It also says he is “widely regarded as one of the most conservative members of Congress”.
Nonetheless, in a letter dated 7 November, he asked the US district judge in Nichols’s case, Royce C Lamberth, to show leniency when passing down sentence.
“Sir,” Higgins wrote. “I submit to you this letter in support of Ryan Taylor Nichols. He is a man of good character, faith, and core principles.
“I humbly ask that he receive fair consideration of the whole of circumstances regarding his case, condition, and background. He has already served nearly two years in the District of Columbia jail in pretrial confinement, which has been destructive to his physical (liver issues) and mental health (PTSD).”
Nichols had been under house arrest since 22 November 2022 and had “not sought to flee nor shown any indication of dangerous activity”, Higgins said.
He added: “Prior to his arrest, Mr Nichols had no criminal background and served honorably in the United States Marine Corps. He continued to serve domestically in a search and rescue capacity, even being publicly recognised for his heroic actions on national television.”
So, that cartoon sums up Higgin’s views of thugs pretty well. I’m sure you can all name at least 5 crazy Republicans in Congress. Now, add Higgins to that list. Right Wingers with money, businesses, and platforms that serve as Republican enablers and donors are equally as nuts these days. I’ve heard more than a few references to Henry Ford’s wingnuttery and the bat shit crazy Elon Musk. Musk is placing NAZI propaganda on X quite close to the ads he relies on for revenues. This is from MediaMatters for America. “As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content. CEO Linda Yaccarino previously claimed that brands are “protected from the risk of being next to” toxic posts.” This is reported by Eric Hananoki.
Update (11/16/23): IBM released a statement to the Financial Times saying that it has “suspended all advertising on X while we investigate this entirely unacceptable situation.” Media Matters will update if the other major companies in this report take any similar actions.
As X owner Elon Musk continues his descent into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, his social media platform has been placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. The company’s placements come after CEO Linda Yaccarino claimed that brands are “protected from the risk of being next to” toxic posts on the platform.
Yaccarino has been trying to bring advertisers back to the platform by claiming it’s safe for business. She’s also claimed that X (formerly Twitter) has been “demonstrating its absolute commitment to combating antisemitism on the platform” and that “antisemitism is evil and X will always work to fight it on our platform.”
But her boss last night endorsed the pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people are supporting “hordes of minorities” who are “flooding” into the country to replace white people. That conspiracy theory was the same one that motivated the deadly 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting.
During all of this Musk-induced chaos, corporate advertisements have also been appearing on pro-Hitler, Holocaust denial, white nationalist, pro-violence, and neo-Nazi accounts. Yaccarino has attempted to placate companies by claiming that “brands are now ‘protected from the risk of being next to’ potentially toxic content.”
But that certainly isn’t the case for at least five major brands: We recently found ads for Apple, Bravo, Oracle, Xfinity, andIBM next to posts that tout Hitler and his Nazi Party on X
Elon Musk has publicly endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular among White supremacists: that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.”
That kind of overt thumbs up to an antisemitic post shocked even some of Musk’s critics, who have long called him out for using racist or otherwise bigoted dog whistles on Twitter, now known as X. It was the multibillionaire’s most explicit public statement yet endorsing anti-Jewish views.
ICYMI: Musk was responding to a post Wednesday that said Jewish communities “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory.
It’s the kind of post you can find easily on X these days, and likely would have gone unnoticed had Musk, with more than 160 million followers, not re-shared the post with the comment: “You have said the actual truth.”
The antisemitic conspiracy theory — which posits that Jews want to bring undocumented minority populations into Western countries to reduce White majorities in those nations — is often espoused by hate groups.
It’s the same conspiracy echoed in the final written words of Robert Bowers, the convicted murderer of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. His last social media post said that a Jewish nonprofit dedicated to aiding refugees “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people.” The mass shooting was the deadliest attack against Jews in American history.
Musk, in subsequent posts, expounded on his views. He wrote that he does not believe hatred of White people extends “to all Jewish communities.” But then he singled out the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that it promotes racism against White people.
X did not respond to requests for comment.
This confuses me to no end because other than the late Sammy Davis, Jr., I thought all European Jews were white. I just don’t get this weird view of race and gender where some right wing nut gets to have purity standards based on some genetic code only they seem to know. I hope this sinks X for good but all that will do is likely get an even more outrageous set of hate crimes against our Jewish population. I have issues with the Bibi’s government and with the entire concept of Zionism but for goodness’ sake, having policy differences with a nation does not mean I hate its people. It certainly doesn’t mean I blame any American Jewish person for what the approach is now to the West Bank either. I also do not blame the population of the West Bank or Gaza on the actions of Hamas. All this right winger craziness torched to a burnt earth strategy by messianic cults just makes me very sad.
So, we need to address the continuing saga which is Congressman George Santos. He appears to be the only Drag Queen that right wing Republicans want to keep around. After he announced he would not be running for reelection this week, he likely believed his expulsion was less likely. That’s not a good assumption, gurl! The AP has this breaking news headline. “Ethics chairman launches a new bid to expel George Santos after a withering report on his conduct.”
The chairman of the House Ethics Committee announced Friday he has filed a resolution to force a vote on expelling Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., from Congress, one day after the committee issued a withering report detailing substantial evidence that Santos converted campaign donations for his own personal use.
Santos easily survived an expulsion vote earlier this month as lawmakers in both parties stressed the need to allow due process, as Santos is also facing nearly two dozen charges in federal court. But the release of the committee’s findings has generated new momentum for ousting the scandal-plagued freshman. Shortly after the report was released, Santos announced he would not seek reelection.
“The evidence uncovered in the Ethics Committee’s Investigative Subcommittee investigation is more than sufficient to warrant punishment and the most appropriate punishment, is expulsion,” said Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss.
Stein’s Candidacy: Mary Trump also weighed in on Jill Stein’s announcement that she would run for office in 2024 on behalf of the Green Party. Calling her a “pro-Putin hack,” Mary Trump noted that she played a spoiler to Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2016.
“She had no chance of winning; and the only candidate whose chances she was going to hurt was Hillary Clinton. That was precisely the point,” Mary Trump said.
The psychologist said her stance against Stein was not simply because of the enormous damage she did eight years ago, but also because in those intervening years, she has done nothing. “She’s a fraud whose only purpose seems to be lining her own pockets in the service of undermining the only party that has a shot at saving American democracy,” the ex-president’s niece said.
Look Ahead: Mary Trump also said the focus in the coming weeks would be “Whether or not Donald’s mental decline is worsening or just becoming more obvious as the stressors in his life compound” and “Will the corporate media focus, in a serious and sustained way, on his multiplying verbal gaffes and cognitive errors.”
The psychologist noted that Donald Trump’s dangerous rhetoric has been ramping up and he was not only echoing Hitler but was also sometimes quoting the German dictator. While Hitler promised to “get rid of the communist vermin,” the ex-president in his “Veteran’s Day” message promised to get rid of “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.
Yes, once again I’m reporting all the news that no one really wants to hear. I just want to keep scaring everyone into voting for anyone but these crazy people.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Cats can be mysterious creatures to begin with, but their ability to purr has long perplexed scientists. How can so small an animal make such a deep sound?
Now, scientists may be one step closer to solving this perplexing pet puzzle. Cats, they say, have pads within their vocal cords that may help produce the low-frequency vocalizations involved in purring, according to a new paper published last week in the journal Current Biology.
Big animals, like elephants, have longer vocal cords than smaller animals do, which allows them to produce lower sounds. The same rule applies to musical instruments: A large double bass can produce lower notes than a small violin does, for example.
“Typically, the larger the animal, the longer the vocal folds and so the lower the frequency of sound created,” says study co-author Christian Herbst, a voice scientist at the University of Vienna, to New Scientist’s Jason Arunn Murugesu.
But domestic cats, with their relatively short vocal cords, seem to be an exception to this rule. Though they typically weigh around ten pounds, when purring, they can make low-frequency rumbles between 20 and 30 hertz—lower than the lowest bass sounds made with the average human voice.
To explain this phenomenon, researchers studied eight domestic cats that had already been euthanized because of terminal illness. With the cat owners’ consent, the scientists removed the animals’ larynges from their bodies, then pushed warm air through them to simulate feline vocalizations.
With this method, the researchers were able to produce purring sounds at frequencies between 25 and 30 hertz—without any input from the cat’s brain, and without any muscle contractions. The vocal cords vibrated in a way that resembled “vocal fry” in humans, or the creaky, low register sound some people make when speaking.
Other vertebrates produce sounds in a similar way—via a passive process known as flow-induced self-sustained oscillation. When this occurs, the brain sends a signal to the vocal cords that causes them to press together. As air flows through the vocal cords, they begin to vibrate—and from here, physiology takes over, and the brain is no longer involved….
The researchers analyzed the deceased cats’ vocal cords and found masses of tissue embedded within them that they theorize might be the key to purring. These structures, which they termed “pads,” might slow down the vocal cords’ vibrations by making them denser, enabling the animals to make lower-frequency sounds in spite of their diminutive size.
Interesting, huh?
In people news, longtime GOP strategist and author Kevin Phillips has died.
“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.”
That insight was the brainchild of Kevin Phillips, the longtime political analyst who passed away this week at 82 years old. Phillips’s 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” provided the blueprint for the “southern strategy” that the Republican Party adopted for decades to win over White voters who were alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.
Phillips advised Republicans to exploit the racial anxieties of White voters, linking them directly to issues such as crime, federal spending and voting rights. The strategy, beginning with Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 presidential race, helped produce GOP majorities for decades.
To the witch’s house we go, by Margaryta Yermolayeva
Though Phillips later reconsidered his fealty to the GOP, updated versions of the “southern strategy” live on in today’s Republican Party, shaping the political world we inhabit today. So I asked historians and political theorists to weigh in on Phillips’s legacy. Their responses have been edited for style and brevity.
Kevin Kruse, historian at Princeton University and co-editor of “Myth America”: Kevin Phillips was a prophet of today’s polarization. He drew a blueprint for a major realignment of American politics that is still with us. For much of the 20th century, Democrats dominated the national scene, because of the reliable support of the “Solid South.”
But the “Negro problem” of the 1960s, Phillips argued, presented Republicans an opportunity to take the South and Southwest, too, a new region he anointed “the Sun Belt.” All they had to do was appeal to the hatreds of White voters there, through racially coded “law and order” appeals.
Phillips, of course, proved correct about the regional realignment. Republicans won every single state in the South in the 1972, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. Today, Republicans dominate the region partly because they still employ Phillips’s polarizing politics of resentment and reaction, from complaints about Black Lives Matter to panics about “woke” education. Donald Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP shows that the underlying instinct to exploit division and inflame hatred remains.
Read the rest, including more quotes by experts, at The WaPo.
House Republicans are still in chaos. Yesterday, one of the craziest House reps, George Santos, had an insane freakout in the midst of the Speaker fight.
We’ve all had an extremely long week, as you’re likely aware. On Friday afternoon, George Santos, the New York representative whose tally of alleged federal crimes is now up to 23, was spotted screaming in the hallway of the Longworth House Office Building. It appears Santos — who famously suggested his family was Jewish then revised this to “Jew-ish” — was accosted by pro-Palestinian protesters.
Normally, neither a small protest on Capitol Hill nor George Santos shouting in front of a gaggle of reporters would be all that notable. But there’s the twist: Santos was holding a 2-month-old baby when this all went down….
You probably have a lot of questions right now, as do I. Hartmann doesn’t have any answers. She posted some tweets, but WordPress won’t let me do that anymore. You can read them at NY Mag.
Rep. George Santos (R-NY) had a complete meltdown on Friday afternoon during a tense interaction on Capitol Hill that ended with a man in police custody—and somehow involved a baby.
According to a clip shared by NBC News’ Sahil Kapur, Santos called the man, identified by cops as Shabd Khalsa, “human scum” for asking him questions critical of Israel’s bombings in Gaza….
“You came into my personal space yelling at me,” Santos fumed. “What are you doing about terrorists destroying Israel?” He then sped down a hallway in the Capitol’s Longworth Building, screaming statements condemning Hamas….
Capitol Police said in a statement to The Daily Beast that 36-year-old Khalsa was arrested and charged him with simple assault “after an officer witnessed him have physical contact with a congressional staffer in the Longworth Building.” The staffer was not identified.
A profile on X under the name Shabd Singh, the same name Khalsa gave to reporters, says that he is a former campaign organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT).
He told The Hill that he was Jewish-American and that Santos, who was previously busted falsely claiming to be Jewish, “began yelling at me, essentially framing what I am saying as some sort of antisemitic trope.”
Still no information about the baby. If you’ve heard anything about the origins of the child or what Santos was doing with him/her, please let us know.
As Daknikat wrote yesterday, Insurrectionist Jim Jordon is currently the leading candidate for House Speaker, but he doesn’t yet have the votes to be election, thank goodness.
After a series of setbacks, Republicans ended the week no closer to electing a new speaker as deep internal divisions have left the conference struggling to govern and the House in a state of paralysis.
The chaos within House GOP ranks intensified dramatically over the past several days as the conference has tried and so far failed to find a viable successor to Kevin McCarthy following his unprecedented ouster at the hands of a small faction of hardline conservatives.
Black Cat Halloween, by Iva Wilcox
Rep. Jim Jordan is the new GOP speaker nominee following Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s exit from the race. But the Ohio Republican faces the same kind of grim vote math that doomed Scalise’s speaker bid as Jordan lacks the 217 votes needed to win the gavel in a full House floor vote.
Jordan has the weekend to continue to make his case and attempt to flip holdouts, but he faces a steep uphill battle.
The GOP conference faced whiplash this week after Scalise won an initial vote to become speaker nominee, only to drop out not long after as a result of entrenched opposition to his candidacy. The week ended with another vote, this time to make Jordan the new nominee. But it soon became clear that Jordan also faces a stiff wall of resistance.
The House remains effectively frozen as long as there is no speaker, a dire situation that comes as Congress faces a fast-approaching government funding deadline in mid-November and as crisis unfolds abroad in Ukraine and with Israel’s war against Hamas.
Asked by CNN’s Manu Raju how the entire episode reflects on the GOP, McCarthy said on Friday, “it’s terrible.”
Centrists are signaling they’re open to a deal. Democrats are outlining terms. With no speaker in sight yet, House Republicans are ramping up their discussions about a way to reopen the chamber.
A bipartisan solution to the GOP’s leadership chaos still sounds farfetched to most on the Hill — but then, so does the idea that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) might overcome his dozens of skeptics and win a floor vote early next week.
There’s just one problem with the idea that a temporary compromise could get the House back to legislative business: It has the same issue that plagued the speakership bids of Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise and now Jordan. Right now, no solution has the near-unanimous House Republican support that’s required to pass on the floor.
Which means that, unless Jordan can overcome his skeptics and push to victory on the floor in the next several days, the only way forward might be with Democrats. A group of centrist Democrats wrote to Acting Speaker Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) on Friday to propose a limited agenda and some perks for the opposing party in exchange for temporarily restarting House business during a time of global crisis.
Some self-described GOP pragmatists have suggested that if Republicans can’t chart a course on their own, they could cut a deal with Democrats to break the 10-day impasse.
“At some point we have to do a bipartisan deal. I mean, they don’t want to acknowledge it, but these guys do not want to govern,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said of his own party’s conservatives.
But as desperation creeps into the GOP while Jordan pushes to lock down the gavel, it’s clear that any attempt to further empower a caretaker speaker would fall short within their own party. McHenry has indicated that his future role as acting speaker is up to his colleagues to settle — even as the Nov. 17 shutdown deadline draws closer and Israel seeks U.S. aid — but his fellow Republicans simply can’t agree on anything.
Read more at the link above.
I suppose I have to include some news from the war between Israel and Hamas. (BTW, is it just me, or has the Ukraine war completely disappeared from the media?)
A blast has struck a convoy on an evacuation route in Gaza, killing a number of people including several children, after a stark deadline ahead of a possible Israeli ground assault.
The IDF told civilians in and around Gaza City Friday that they must move south to avoid being caught up in Israeli military operations and announced a six-hour evacuation window on Saturday.
Black Cat at Halloween, by Daniel Eskridge
Israel has massed troops and military equipment at the border with Gaza, and continued bombarding the densely populated territory in response to the deadly October 7 attacks by the Islamist militant group, Hamas.
Videos authenticated by CNN showed a scene of extensive destruction following Friday’s blast on Salah Al-Deen street. A number of bodies, including those of children, can be seen on on a flat-bed trailer that appears to have been used to carry people away from Gaza City. There are also a number of badly burned and damaged cars.
It’s unclear what caused the widespread devastation. CNN has reached out to the IDF for comment on any airstrikes in the same location.
Even before the evacuation warning, more than 400,000 Palestinians had already been internally displaced by the past week of fighting as conditions worsen inside the bombarded strip.
But the evacuation statement and the prospect of a potential incursion have been sharply criticized by rights groups, including the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) head, who warned that such a move could bring “catastrophic humanitarian consequences.”
As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead.
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
When a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” the Israeli president claimed, “No, I didn’t say that.”
But he then stated: “When you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?”
At another point in the press conference, Herzog presented a different perspective, saying, “Of course there are many, many innocent Palestinians who don’t agree to this — but unfortunately in their homes, there are missiles shooting at us, at my children.”
Ghost Cat, by Neocale at Deviant Art
Herzog’s comments follow Israel’s announcement that it had directed the 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to evacuate, likely ahead of a ground invasion. Israel dropped thousands of flyers over northern Gaza and left voice messages on Friday directing people to leave their homes and flee south.
Human rights groups and the United Nations denounced the evacuation order.
“The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, said in a statement. “The United Nations strongly appeals for any such order, if confirmed, to be rescinded avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”
“Ordering a million people in Gaza to evacuate, when there’s no safe place to go, is not an effective warning,” Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor to Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “World leaders should speak up now before it is too late, he added.
Documents exclusively obtained by NBC News show that Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa’ad, to “kill as many people as possible,” seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.
The attack plans, which are labeled “top secret” in Arabic, appear to be orders for two highly trained Hamas units to surround and infiltrate villages and target places where civilians, including children, gather. Israeli authorities are still determining the death toll in Kfar Sa’ad.
The documents were found on the bodies of Hamas terrorists by Israeli first responders and shared with NBC News. They include detailed maps and show that Hamas intended to kill or take hostage civilians and school children.
One page labeled “Top Secret” outlines a plan of attack for Kfar Sa’ad, saying “Combat unit 1” is directed to “contain the new Da’at school,” while “Combat unit 2” is to “collect hostages,” “search the Bnei Akiva youth center” and “search the old Da’at school.”
Another page labeled “Top Secret Maneuver” describes a plan for a Hamas unit to secure the east side of Kfar Sa’ad while a second unit controls the west. It says “kills as many as possible” and “capture hostages.” Other orders include surrounding a dining hall and holding hostages in it.
The detailed plan to attack Kfar Sa’ad is part of a trove of documents that Israeli officials are analyzing, according to one source in the Israeli army and one in the government. Surveillance video of Hamas terrorists entering a kibbutz on Oct. 7 shows tactics similar to those laid out in the documents obtained by NBC News.
The Israeli officials said that the wider group of documents show that Hamas had been systematically gathering intelligence on each kibbutz bordering Gaza and creating specific plans of attack for each village that included the intentional targeting of women and children.
The judge presiding over the upcoming damages trial against Rudy Giuliani said Friday she will tell jurors that the former Trump lawyer intentionally hid financial documents and other records in defiance of court orders.
Vlad Vampire Cat, by Carrie Hawks
In a five-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said the move was necessary given “Giuliani’s continued and flagrant disregard of this Court’s August 30 Order that he produce financial-related documents concerning his personal and his businesses’ past and present assets” and other pertinent information.
That means jurors deciding how much Giuliani should pay two Georgia election workers he defamed will be told they can assume the worst about why the former New York City mayor has failed to turn over the court-ordered records.
“The jury will be instructed that it must, when determining an appropriate sum of compensatory, presumed, and punitive damages, infer that defendant Giuliani was intentionally trying to hide relevant discovery about the Giuliani Businesses’ finances for the purpose of shielding his assets from discovery and artificially deflating his net worth,” the judge wrote.
Additionally, Giuliani and his lawyer will be prohibited “from making any argument, or introducing any evidence, stating or suggesting that he is insolvent, bankrupt, judgment proof, or otherwise unable to defend himself” since he failed to hand over evidence that would show that’s true, the judge wrote.
You might be forgiven for thinking it’s been a very quiet few months for the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides the rollout of new boosters, the coronavirus has largely slipped out of the headlines. But the virus is on the move. Viral levels in wastewater are similar to what they were during the first two waves of the pandemic. Recent coverage of the so-called Pirola variant, which is acknowledged to have “an alarming number of mutations,” led with the headline “Yes, There’s a New Covid Variant. No, You Shouldn’t Panic.”
Even if you haven’t heard much about the new strain of the coronavirus, being told not to panic might induce déjà vu. In late 2021, as the Omicron variant was making its way to the United States, Anthony Fauci told the public that it was “nothing to panic about” and that “we should not be freaking out.” Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s former Covid czar, also cautioned against undue alarm over Omicron BA.1, claiming that there was “absolutely no reason to panic.” This is a telling claim, given what was to follow—the six weeks of the Omicron BA.1 wave led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in a matter of weeks, a mortality event unprecedented in the history of the republic.
Indeed, experts have been offering the public advice about how to feel about Covid-19 since January 2020, when New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo opined, “Panic will hurt us far more than it’ll help.” That same week, Zeke Emanuel—a former health adviser to the Obama administration, latterly an adviser to the Biden administration—said Americans should “stop panicking and being hysterical.… We are having a little too much [sic] histrionics about this.”
This concern about public panic has been a leitmotif of the Covid-19 pandemic, even earning itself a name (“elite panic”) among some scholars. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned, three and a half years into the current crisis, it’s that—contrary to what the movies taught us—pandemics don’t automatically spawn terror-stricken stampedes in the streets. Media and public health coverage have a strong hand in shaping public response and can—under the wrong circumstances—promote indifference, incaution, and even apathy. A very visible example of this was the sharp drop in the number of people masking after the CDC revised its guidelines in 2021, recommending that masking was not necessary for the vaccinated (from 90 percent in May to 53 percent in September).
As that example suggests, emphasizing the message “don’t panic” puts the cart before the horse unless tangible measures are being taken to prevent panic-worthy outcomes. And indeed, these repeated assurances against panic have arguably also preempted a more vigorous and
urgent public health response—as well as perversely increasing public acceptance of the risks posed by coronavirus infection and the unchecked transmission of the virus. This “moral calm”—a sort of manufactured consent—impedes risk mitigation by promoting the underestimation of a threat. Soothing public messaging during disasters can often lead to an increased death toll: Tragically, false reassurance contributed to mortality in both the attacks on the World Trade Center and the sinking of the Titanic.
Read the rest at The Nation. The gist is that Covid-19 is still out there and still dangerous. Pretending it’s not won’t help us.
That’s my contribution for today. What do you think? What other stories have caught your interest?
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It’s not uncommon for violence to break out between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza. It typically goes like this: Hamas throws rockets over the Gaza border into Israel, most of which are intercepted by the Iron Dome — Israel’s very sophisticated missile defense system. The impact in Israel is usually minimized.
Israel then responds with airstrikes on the densely populated Gaza Strip.
But what happened last weekend was unprecedented in its scale and coordination.
Militants attacked Israeli communication towers with improvised explosives, they breached the Gaza-Israel border fence within minutes and assumed control of several Israeli communities. They paraglided over the border and gunned down civilians at a music festival.
Hamas killed 1,200 people in the attack, and took dozens hostage, including women, children and the elderly — all while Israel’s military was late to respond. It was the deadliest attack Israel has seen in decades.
In retaliation, Israel has laid siege to Gaza with hundreds of airstrikes that have killed at least 1,000 Palestinians and displaced more than 200,000 people. It has cut off electricity, food and fuel supplies.
Speaking to mayors of the southern border towns that were hit by the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel’s response “will change the Middle East.”
Troops have now amassed for a possible ground invasion of Gaza – which last happened in 2014 and resulted in at least 2,000 Palestinians killed, and more than 70 on the Israeli side. It’s the biggest escalation in the decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in recent years.
But experts who follow the region closely point to key developments over the past year in Israel and the Palestinian territories that set the stage for this explosion of violence.
Israel says it has reinforced its northern area with thousands of extra units after trading fire with Lebanon.
Its army shelled militant targets in Lebanon after two missiles were fired at an Israeli military post near the unofficial border.
Three people were injured in the shelling which hit several towns and villages, Lebanese state media said.
The Hezbollah movement said the missiles were a response to the killing of three of its fighters on Monday.
The exchange came as Israel bombed Gaza in retaliation for Palestinian militant group Hamas’ unprecedented attack.
Turning from Inner War to Inner Peace, by Monika Kretschmar
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said an anti-tank missile was fired from Lebanon towards an Israeli military post near the village of Arab al-Aramshe, which is just south of the UN-demarcated Blue Line – the unofficial border which separates Israel and Lebanon.
Hezbollah said it targeted the position “in a decisive retaliation to Zionist aggression on Monday”. It claimed that the missile caused several Israeli casualties.
The IDF said that as part of its response to the attack, aircraft attacked an observation post inside Lebanon belonging to Hezbollah. Artillery also shelled the missile launch site. It did not report any casualties among its troops.
Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that three civilians were wounded and 10 houses were damaged by Israeli fire in the town of Marwahin. The towns of Yarin, and Dharya were also hit, it said.
“We have deployed tens of thousands additional units along the northern border,” IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus said on Wednesday, referring to infantry, special forces, armoured forces, artillery, air forces and intelligence.
“The message to Hezbollah is very clear. If they will try to attack, we are ready and vigilant along our border,” he added.
You know, there are moments in this life — and I mean this literally — when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world.
The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend. The bloody hands of the terrorist organization Hamas — a group whose stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.
This was an act of sheer evil.
More than 1,000 civilians slaughtered — not just killed, slaughtered — in Israel. Among them, at least 14 American citizens killed.
Parents butchered using their bodies to try to protect their children.
Stomach-turning reports of being — babies being killed.
Entire families slain.
Imagine, by Lisa Botto Lee
Young people massacred while attending a musical festival to celebrate peace — to celebrate peace.
Women raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.
Families hid their fear for hours and hours, desperately trying to keep their children quiet to avoid drawing attention.
And thousands of wounded, alive but carrying with them the bullet holes and the shrapnel wounds and the memory of what they endured.
You all know these traumas never go away.
There are still so many families desperately waiting to hear the fate of their loved ones, not knowing if they’re alive or dead or hostages.
Infants in their mothers’ arms, grandparents in wheelchairs, Holocaust survivors abducted and held hostage — hostages whom Hamas has now threatened to execute in violation of every code of human morality.
It’s abhorrent.
The brutality of Hamas — this bloodthirstiness — brings to mind the worst — the worst rampages of ISIS.
Nine United Nations staff members have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza since Saturday, the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees confirmed Wednesday.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said nine staffers have been killed in airstrikes since the start of Israel’s counterattack on Gaza, with several of the staff members killed late Tuesday.
Deborah Milton, I wish I could
“The protection of civilians is paramount, including in times of conflict,” Juliette Touma, UNRWA director of communications, told The Associated Press. “They should be protected in accordance with the laws of war.”
The strikes are part of an aggressive counteroffensive by the Israeli military, after the Palestinian militant group Hamas sent a barrage of rocket strikes and militants into the country Saturday in a surprise attack, leaving behind horrific scenes of brutalized villages along the border….
By Wednesday, several neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip had been demolished after the Israeli military pounded the area with air strikes.
Touma told the AP the U.N. staff members were killed in their homes across the Gaza Strip. She said the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City and many schools-turned-shelters were damaged as well.
The U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, said Tuesday that clear evidence has emerged showing war crimes being committed on both sides of the conflict.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is flying to Israel on Wednesday in a show of support for the country as it begins a major offensive campaign in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in response to a wave of deadly cross-border attacks by the militant group.
The top U.S. diplomat is expected to meet with senior Israeli officials to receive an update on the security situation and inquire what else the United States can provide to Israel as it works to regain control of its border, free hostages and destroy Hamas’s operational capacity following the surprise attacks by gunmen who inflicted the bloodiest day in Israel’s 75-year history.
“It will be a message of solidarity and support,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in describing the thrust of the trip.
Since the Hamas invasion on Saturday morning and massacre of Israeli civilians, Blinken has made a flurry of calls with his counterparts in the Middle East in an effort to have U.S. allies and partners send a clear message to Iran, Hezbollah and Palestinians in the West Bank to refrain from entering the conflict.
“We’ve been on the phones throughout our government over the last 24 hours, engaging everyone in the region and well beyond,” Blinken told CNN on Sunday, “both to make sure that there is support for Israel and that every country is using every effort to pull Hamas back and to prevent this from escalating.”
Israeli officials have made several specific requests to Washington in response to the military offensive by Hamas, including a replenishment of Iron Dome ground-to-air missile interceptors, small-diameter bombs, ammunition for machine guns and heightened cooperation on intelligence-sharing particularly in southern Lebanon, according to U.S. officials familiar with the requests.
“President Biden’s direction was to make sure that we’re providing Israel everything it needs in this moment to deal with the attacks from Hamas,” Blinken said.
Heal the World, by Hiske Bain
Back in the U.S., House Republicans are still trying to figure out what to do about finding a new Speaker. It’s not looking good at the moment. The choice so far is between two deeply flawed candidates: Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise. Jordan is tainted by a sexual abuse scandal when he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State; Scalise once referred to himself as “David Duke without the baggage.” He’s also being treated for an aggressive form of cancer.
Former Ohio State wrestlers who accuse Jim Jordan of ignoring sexual abuse when he was a coach said the hard-right Republican should not be elected speaker of the US House.
“Do you really want a guy in that job who chose not to stand up for his guys?” Mike Schyck, one of hundreds of wrestlers who say they were assaulted by a team doctor, told NBC News. “Is that the kind of character trait you want for a House speaker?”
Another former wrestler, Dunyasha Yetts, told NBC: “He doesn’t deserve to be House speaker. He still has to answer for what happened to us.”
Jordan, 59 and a founder of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, is competing for the speakership with Steve Scalise, the majority leader from Louisiana, after the historic ejection of Kevin McCarthy by disgruntled right-wingers last week. Jordan has secured the endorsement of Donald Trump, the presidential frontrunner whose supporters orchestrated McCarthy’s defenestration.
Before entering politics, Jordan was an assistant OSU wrestling coach from 1986 to 1994. Former athletes have said he ignored rampant sexual abuse by Richard Strauss, a team doctor who died in 2005.
A bit more:
Jordan has long denied helping orchestrate a cover-up. On Tuesday, a spokesperson told NBC: “Chairman Jordan never saw or heard of any abuse, and if he had, he would have dealt with it.”
But Jordan also refused to co-operate with an official investigation which found Strauss’s abuse was an “open secret”, and that “coaches, trainers and other team physicians were fully aware of Strauss’ activities, and yet few seemed inclined to do anything to stop it”.
Healing from the Inside, by Kathryn Rutherford
At one hearing, another former wrestler, Adam DiSabato, said: “Jim Jordan called me crying, crying, groveling, on the Fourth of July … begging me to go against my brother, begging me, crying for half an hour. That’s the kind of cover-up that’s going on here. He’s a coward. He’s a coward.”
Yetts has previously said: “If Jordan says he didn’t know about it, then he’s lying.”
Speaking to NBC, another former wrestler, Rocky Ratliff, said Jordan “abandoned his former wrestlers in the Ohio State sexual abuse scandal and cover-up”….
Schyck told NBC he was himself a Republican, and Jordan “was somebody I revered, somebody I looked up to.
“If early on he jumped in on our side and validated what we were saying, what everybody knew about what Dr Strauss was doing to us, then this wouldn’t be happening. But he decided early on, for reasons I still don’t understand, that he was going to deny knowing anything about this.
As everyone here knows, Jordan is also not very bright and a lying MAGA conspiracy theorist.
House Republicans were expected to meet this morning at 10:00, and they are voting now. Neither candidate is believed to have the votes to be elected. Financial Times: House Republicans begin voting on nominee for Speaker.
House Republicans have started voting for their nominee for Speaker, amid a growing sense of urgency to determine who will lead the lower house and address pressing issues on the US’s domestic and international agendas.
Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, and Jim Jordan, who chairs the judiciary committee, made their cases to colleagues in a closed-door forum on Tuesday evening, although neither candidate was in a position to claim the upper hand ahead of Wednesday’s conference vote. The two rival candidates are vying for support on the private ballot, after eight rebels led an unprecedented revolt against Kevin McCarthy last week. Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado, told the FT he voted “present” for Speaker after neither Scalise nor Jordan adequately answered his question on Tuesday about who won the 2020 presidential election. “It’s a yes or no question,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody has 217 [votes],” Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene said on Tuesday night. “If it comes out that neither one of them can get there, then yes, we’re going to have to produce another candidate.” For Republicans, the lack of a clear outcome risks a replay of events in January, when it took a record 15 rounds of voting for the party to elect McCarthy as Speaker. More broadly, the abrupt downfall of the former Speaker last week has created chaos in the House. The lower chamber is at a standstill, unable to pass legislation, as the US weighs whether to provide additional aid to Israel and Ukraine in their respective conflicts with Hamas and Russia. Lawmakers must also pass a spending bill by November 17 to avoid a US government shutdown.
Federal prosecutors hit Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., with 23 additional charges Tuesday, including allegations of identity theft and that he charged a supporter’s credit card in excess of the supporter’s contribution and then transferred the money to his personal bank account.
Prosecutors said Santos faces “one count of conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States, two counts of wire fraud, two counts of making materially false statements to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), two counts of falsifying records submitted to obstruct the FEC, two counts of aggravated identity theft, and one count of access device fraud” in a superseding indictment filed Tuesday.
Keith Morant, Requiem
“As alleged, Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign. Santos falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement….
Prosecutors said in a news release that the scheme included falsely claiming that relatives of Santos and his then-campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, had donated big bucks to his campaign to make it appear that he was raising more money than he actually was in order to qualify for assistance from the national party.
“To create the public appearance that his campaign had met that financial benchmark” for additional funds from the Republican Party “and was otherwise financially viable, Santos and Marks agreed to falsely report to the FEC that at least 10 family members of Santos and Marks had made significant financial contributions to the campaign when Santos and Marks both knew that these individuals had neither made the reported contributions nor given authorization for their personal information to be included in such false public reports.”
He is also alleged to have been involved in a credit card scheme in which the campaign would charge contributors’ credit cards repeatedly and above FEC individual contribution limits.
A group of House Republicans from New York are introducing a resolution to expel Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., from Congress.
“Today, I’ll be introducing an expulsion resolution to rid the People’s House of fraudster George Santos,” Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y., said in a post on the social media platform X.
He said the resolution will be co-sponsored by fellow New York House Republicans Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, Marc Molinaro, Nick Langworthy and Brandon Williams.
The move comes a day after federal prosecutors issued Santos a 23–count superseding indictment alleging he committed identity theft, fraud and other offenses. Santos, who was first indicted in May, has said he plans on fighting the charges. He pleaded not guilty to the charges in the original 13-count indictment earlier this year.
Those are the top stories today. What are your thoughts? What other stories are you following?
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Cliffs of Varengeville, gust of wind, by Claude Monet
Good Afternoon!!
We can all agree that the right-wingers on the Supreme Court have created problems not only for women, but for all of American society. They seem determined to turn this country into a theocracy dominated by so-called “christians” who don’t follow Jesus’s teachings. In fact, they don’t seem interested in the New Testament at all. They prefer the fire and brimstone god of the Old Testament.
Linda Greenhouse, who reported on the Court for The New York Times for many years before leaving in 2021, has returned with an important op-ed.
Federal civil rights law requires employers to accommodate their employees’ religious needs unless the request would impose “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.” Congress didn’t bother to define “undue hardship,” so 46 years ago the Supreme Court came up with a definition of its own.
An accommodation requiring an employer “to bear more than a de minimis cost” — meaning a small or trifling cost — need not be granted, the court said in Trans World Airlines v. Hardison. In that case, an airline maintenance worker claimed a legal right to avoid Saturday shifts so he could observe the tenets of the Worldwide Church of God, which he had recently joined. Ruling for the airline, the court noted that if one worker got Saturdays off for religion reasons, the burden would fall on other workers who might have nonreligious reasons for wanting to have the weekend off.
“We will not readily construe the statute to require an employer to discriminate against some employees in order to enable others to observe their Sabbath,” the court said.
Treating religion as nothing particularly special, the decision reflected the spirit of the times but was deeply unpopular in religious circles. There have been many attempts over many years to persuade Congress to amend the law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to shift the balance explicitly in favor of religiously observant employees. Between 1994 and 2019, more than a dozen such bills were introduced. None emerged from Congress.
And so now, a very different court from the one that ruled 46 years ago is about to do the work itself.
Now the Court has agreed to hear a case that may move us further away from the separation of church and state.
The appeal was brought by a conservative Christian litigating group, First Liberty Institute, on behalf of a former postal worker, Gerald Groff, described as a Christian who regards Sunday as a day for “worship and rest.”
Flood at Port Marly, by Alfred Sisley
Mr. Groff claimed a legal right to avoid the Sunday shifts required during peak season at the post office where he worked. Facing discipline for failing to show up for his assigned shifts, he quit and filed a lawsuit. The lower courts ruled against him, with the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit expressing no doubt that the disruption and loss of morale Mr. Groff’s absences caused in the small rural post office where he worked exceeded the de minimis threshold that the Supreme Court’s 1977 precedent requires an employer to demonstrate.
The decision to hear his appeal brings the Supreme Court to a juncture both predictable and remarkable. It is predictable because Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have all called for a case that would provide a vehicle for overturning a precedent that is clearly in tension with the current court’s privileging of religious claims above all others, whether in the context of public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic or anti-discrimination claims brought by employees of religious organizations.
The court in 1977 worried about the burden on nonreligious workers from accommodations granted to their religious colleagues. To today’s court, as Justice Alito has repeatedly expressed it, the real victims of discrimination are those who take religion seriously.
Read the rest at the NYT link.
The wingnuts on the Supreme Court have already dealt a terrible blow to women’s rights by giving “christian” evangelicals what they long dreamed of–overturning nearly 50 years of women’s rights to make their own reproductive choices. The reversal of Roe v. Wade also drove a truck through the wall of separation between church and state, since the anti-abortion movement is largely based on “christian” evangelical “values.” Ever since that decision, republicans in state legislatures have worked to make getting an abortion more difficult than ever–in some ways more difficult than before Roe.
Kansans may have resoundingly rejected an antiabortion referendum last year, by a striking double-digit margin, to ensure reproductive rights remain enshrined in the state constitution, but that wasn’t deterrence enough for the state’s Republican legislators. Nor was, apparently, the Republican Party’s relatively poor performance this past midterm cycle—one largely defined by the fall of Roe v. Wade. “I’m hearing a lot from my constituents who believe we should continue to do more to help the unborn,” Wichita state senator Chase Blasi told reporters earlier this month, proposing a law that would allow cities and counties to regulate abortions, in spite of state protections.
These first few weeks of 2023 suggest it’s not that Republican lawmakers missed the abortion memo—they simply don’t seem to care. In Washington, a newly empowered Republican House passed an antiabortion bill during its first full week in the majority. And across the country, Republican state lawmakers continue the crusade against reproductive rights, attempting to find ways to circumvent popular opinion, and even statutory protections.
“We knew all along that they weren’t going to be satisfied with overturning Roe v. Wade,” Abby Ledoux, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, says of antiabortion lawmakers and activists in an interview with Vanity Fair. Reflecting on the slew of legislation that has been introduced in state houses across the country so far this year, Ledoux adds, “They’re not done and they’re coming for more rights.”
Wind-Beaten Tree, by Vincent Van Gogh
Since the start of the year, across 27 states, more than 105 bills that would restrict abortion have been filed or prefiled—(meaning, not all of them have been formally introduced), according to Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Many of these bills would ban abortion—some at fertilization; six bills—filed in Kansas, Missouri, New Hampshire, Texas, Wyoming, and West Virginia—would specifically target medication abortions, according to the fund; others would impose harsh criminal penalties for doctors and abortion-seekers. Of course, not all of these bills are expected to pass, but they do lay bare the ever changing legal and political landscape in post-Roe America.
It isn’t just the overt attempts at restricting abortion access that concern reproductive rights activists. But also what Ledoux refers to as “underhanded attempts” and “work-arounds” that have the potential to “subvert democracy, to thwart the will of the people, and to really rig the game” in pursuit of unpopular political agendas. For instance, in Ohio, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would require a supermajority threshold of 60%, as opposed to a simple majority of voters, to pass ballot measures to amend the state constitution. Similar legislation was also introduced in Arizona.
The Biden administration is weighing a plan to declare a public health emergency that would free up resources to help people access abortions.
….Both abortion rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers have urged the Department of Health and Human Services and President Biden to take such a step in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which they say has created a “full-scale reproductive health crisis” across the U.S.
The lawmakers argued that such a move would allow the administration to help support states that protect abortion, deploy Public Health Services Corps teams and give the government “the ability to accelerate access to new medications authorized for abortion.”
….”There are discussions on a wide range of measures … that we can take to try to protect people’s rights,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra told Axios during a pair of Monday public events that touched on reproductive health access.
“There are certain criteria that you look for to be able to declare a public health emergency. That’s typically done by scientists and those that are professionals in those fields who will tell us whether we are in a state of emergency and based on that, I have the ability to make a declaration,” Becerra added,when asked about a public health emergency declaration on abortion.
He said that there hasn’t been a “full assessment” on what a declaration on abortion would look like and whether conditions merit it, but there’s still “an evaluation” on the topic.
More details at the Axios link.
Dodges Ridge, by Andrew Wyeth
Speaking of politicians trying to take away our rights, Ron DeSantis is going further than almost any other governor. He really doesn’t want school children to learn anything about LGBT issues or about the history of African Americans in the U.S.; and he’s banning so many books that the library shelves in schools are nearly empty.
An unrelenting assault on truth and freedom of expression in the form of laws that censor and suppress the viewpoints, histories and experiences of historically marginalized groups, especially Black and L.G.B.T.Q. communities, is underway throughout the country, most clearly in Florida. The state’s Department of Education recently rejected a pilot Advanced Placement African American studies course from being offered in Florida’s public high schools.
Under Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law — which would limit students and teachers from learning and talking about issues related to race and gender — Florida is at the forefront of a nationwide campaign to silence Black voices and erase the full and accurate history and contemporary experiences of Black people. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., the American Civil Liberties Union, the A.C.L.U. of Florida and Ballard Spahr filed a lawsuit on behalf of university professors and a college student opposing the “Stop WOKE” law and, along with a second lawsuit, won a preliminary injunction blocking Florida’s Board of Governors from enforcing its unconstitutional and racially discriminatory provisions at public universities.
Florida’s rejection of the A.P. course and Mr. DeSantis’s demand to excise specific subject areas from the curriculum stand in stark opposition to the state-issued mandate that all students be taught “the history of African Americans, including the history of African peoples before the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery, the passage to America, the enslavement experience, abolition and the contributions of African Americans to society.” [….]
Mr. DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” law relegates the study of the experiences of Black people to a prohibited category. The canceling of any students’ access to accurate, truthful education that reflects their diverse identities and that of their country should chill every American. Not only do these laws offend First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression; to the extent they harm certain groups on the basis of race, gender or other protected status, they also violate principles of equal protection. And they are a chilling precursor to state-sponsored dehumanization of an entire race of people.
This disturbing pattern of silencing Black voices and aggressive attempts to erase Black history are one of the most visible examples of performative white supremacy since the presidency of Donald Trump.
There’s much more at the NYT link.
On DeSantis’s book banning project:
This is what a Florida school now looks like because of a new DeSantis law.
Students arrived in some Florida public school classrooms this month to find their teachers’ bookshelves wrapped in paper — or entirely barren of books — after district officials launched a review of the texts’ appropriateness under a new state law.
School officials in at least two counties, Manatee and Duval, have directed teachers this month to remove or wrap up their classroom libraries, according to records obtained by The Washington Post. The removals come in response to fresh guidance issued by the Florida Department of Education in mid-January, after the State Board of Education ruled that a law restricting the books a district may possess applies not only to schoolwide libraries but to teachers’ classroom collections, too.
House Bill 1467, which took effect as law in July, mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and “suited to student needs.” Books must be approved by a qualified school media specialist, who must undergo a state retraining on book collection. The Education Department did not publish that training until January, leaving school librarians across Florida unable to order books for more than a year.
Breaking the law is a third-degree felony, meaning that a teacher could face up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine for displaying or giving students a disallowed book.
I can just imagine the kinds of people who would take one of those “media specialist” jobs and then undergo “state retraining.”
The efforts to conceal titles in Manatee and Duval have stirred outrage from educators and parents, many of whom shared images of bare wooden shelves or books veiled behind sheets of colored paper. Teachers wrote in Facebook posts and text messages that they are angry and disheartened. District officials in both counties have emphasized that the removals are temporary and will last only until staff can determine whether the titles meet the standards imposed by Florida law.
Stormy Weather, by Alexander Nepote
Michelle Jarrett, president of the Florida Association of Supervisors of Media, which assists school library administrators and programs statewide, said that “closing and covering up classroom libraries does nothing to ensure Florida’s students remain on track for reading success.” [….]
And Marie Masferrer, a board member of the Florida Association for Media in Education and a school librarian who used to work in the Manatee County system and remains in close touch with former colleagues in that district, said they have told her that students are struggling.
At one school, “the kids began crying and writing letters to the principal, saying, ‘Please don’t take my books, please don’t do this,’” Masferrer said.
If DeSantis runs for president in 2024 against Trump, we are going to witness a Republican shit show that will be far worse than 2016 and 2020. DeSantis may be pandering to the crazies, but Trump has truly gone over the edge.
Four-and-a-half years later, Trump is now touting his trust of Putin over American intelligence agencies as a source of pride.
In a post on his Truth Social account, the former president attacked former officials at the FBI and CIA whom he accused of trying to undermine his presidency by investigating his campaign’s multiple contacts with Russian agents during the 2016 presidential race.
“Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our ‘Intelligence’ lowlifes,” he wrote. “My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people in the form of James Comey, McCabe (whose wife was being helped out by Crooked Hillary while Crooked was under investigation!), Brennan, Peter Strzok (whose wife is at the SEC) & his lover, Lisa Page. Now add McGonigal & other slime to the list. Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?”
I’m getting a headache just reading all this stuff. I hope I’m not giving you one too.
Fishing Boats in Rough Weather, by Ludolf Bakhuizen
The New York Times disclosed extraordinary new revelations this past week about prosecutor John Durham’s years-long quest to delegitimize the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In 2019, this obsession of President Donald Trump was initiated by his attorney general, William P. Barr, but as the Times found, Durham’s effort was itself profoundly tainted.
Now, because Democrats have 51 Senate seats after gaining one in the midterm elections, they have subpoena power on Senate committees that were previously divided. That means the Judiciary Committee is in a position to investigate the Barr-Durham escapades.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the Judiciary Committee chair, is signaling such an intent. In an emailed statement, Durbin said that reports of Durham’s “abuses” are “outrageous,” and “one of many instances” in which Trump and Barr “weaponized the Justice Department.”
Durbin added that his committee “will do its part and take a hard look at those repeated episodes, and the regulations and policies that enabled them, to ensure such abuses of power cannot happen again.”
That’s encouraging, but how far will this investigation go? The Times report finds that Barr relentlessly pushed Durham to substantiate Trump’s theory that the Russia investigation was a conspiracy by intelligence and law enforcement against him. But Durham’s effort petered out “without uncovering anything like the deep state plot” invented by Trump and Barr.
Worse, the Times also found bizarre irregularities. Durham relied on Russian intelligence memos to access emails of an adviser to financier George Soros, in hopes of finding evidence of improper collaboration between law enforcement and the Hillary Clinton campaign. It never materialized.
That, plus Barr’s habit of publicly hinting that Durham was on the trail of major wrongdoing — unscrupulously serving Trump’s political interests — were strongly opposed internally by Durham’s top deputy, the Times reports. Similarly, Durham leaned on the department’s inspector general to change his 2019 conclusion that the Russia probe was not politically motivated.
More at the WaPo.
Beach at Scheveningen in Stormy Weather, Vincent Van Gogh
Embattled Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) told House Republicans on Tuesday that he will step down temporarily from his committee assignments amid multiple investigations into his campaign finances after he lied about key aspects of his biography.
Santos, who has admitted to fabricating details about his education, work, religion and heritage since his election in November, said in a closed-door meeting of House Republicans that he would remove himself from his assignments on the House Small Business Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee.
Santos told the meeting he will step down because “he’s a distraction,” according to a Republican lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting. The conversation comes one day after Santos met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)….
Emerging from the meeting, Santos declined to comment, saying, “I think you should talk to leadership if you want details pertaining to committees.”
It sounds like it wasn’t really Santos’ decision, lol. I guess McCarthy was sick and tired of the press hounding him about Santos.
That’s all I have for you today. Have a great Tuesday, everyone!
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Higgins represents Southernmost Louisiana which is basically Cajun Country. He was a 
So, that cartoon sums up Higgin’s views of thugs pretty well. I’m sure you can all name at least 5 crazy Republicans in Congress. Now, add Higgins to that list. Right Wingers with money, businesses, and platforms that serve as Republican enablers and donors are equally as nuts these days. I’ve heard more than a few references to Henry Ford’s wingnuttery and the bat shit crazy Elon Musk. Musk is placing NAZI propaganda on X quite close to the ads he relies on for revenues. 
You may see the ads placements and the offending material at the link. 
So, we need to address the continuing saga which is Congressman George Santos. He appears to be the only Drag Queen that right wing Republicans want to keep around. After he announced he would not be running for reelection this week, he likely believed his expulsion was less likely. That’s not a good assumption, gurl! The AP has this breaking news headline. “Ethics chairman launches a new bid to expel George Santos after a withering report on his conduct.”
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