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“This would be unprecedented. This is not a “government shutdown” over budgetary disagreements. This is an intentional meltdown of the global financial system” If you are unfamiliar with Republican GOP debt ceiling hostage taking, take a few minutes to watch this video with Norm Ornstein on the subject. AEI Election Watch from Dave Troy on Vimeo. I don’t think we need to wonder whether or not if they will do it. Yes, the Democrats would all vote to raise the debt ceiling and would only need to pick off 5 Republicans to make it happen. However, these new rules changes mean the crazies are in charge of what comes to the floor. It’s going to be a nightmare.

Howie Klein sent this out to Blue America members today: Missouri Senator Josh Hawley was complicit in the sacking of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He should have been removed then. Next year he’ll have to face Missouri voters and explain himself. Today he got the opponent best equipped to hold him to account and to represent the interests of Missourians in the Senate—Lucas Kunce. In his announcement this morning, Kunce, a 13-year Marine veteran, said “When things get tough, Missourians deserve someone who will stand up for them, not run for the nearest exit. Our politicians have betrayed Missouri. They’ve forgotten that their job is not only to defend our democracy, but also to fight for the people in it. Josh Hawley is 0 for 2. The frontline in the fight for democracy is right here in Missouri. Communities across our state have been stripped for parts by power-hungry politicians who have no idea what it’s like to live a single day as an average Missourian. Unlike Hawley, I’m no stranger to real life. When times were tough for my family growing up in Jeff City and we were on the edge, our community came together and supported us.

The rise of the far right has unfolded in plain sight. But many people didn’t want to see it. During the Obama years I took a lot of grief for writing about Newt Gingrich and his leadership in the radicalization of the Republican Party. The criticism came from progressives. They thought I was focusing too much on the GOP when I should have been criticizing the Democrats. (I did criticize the Democrats plenty BTW.) But it greatly irritated quite a few people that I followed the developments on the right so closely because they just didn’t take it that seriously. That I kept going back to Newt was considered to be some kind of dodge. If you go back and read this blog over the past 20 years you will see that I got a whole lot of things wrong. Tons. But I was right about this. Here’s Robert Draper on Newt and the GOP NutHouse: Newt Gingrich was disdainful. After watching days of House Republicans failing to elect a speaker, Mr. Gingrich, the most famous of all recent G.O.P. House speakers, vented about the hard-right holdouts, among them Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. “There’s no deal you can make with Gaetz,” Mr.

Historian Joanne B. Freeman discusses previous battles over the speakership and it’s always fascinating to see how much of our current fights are rooted in our past. She concludes with this: It’s tempting to laugh at the strut and fret that took place in the House, much of it seemingly signifying nothing. But it was not just theatrics, and it was not a joke. It was a symptom of a dysfunctional party that is questionably anchored in a democratic politics, and a glaringly obvious sign of things to come. Given Mike Rogers’s near-lunge at Matt Gaetz on Friday night, it’s also an eerie echo of things past. The House has elected a speaker, but that won’t put an end to the internecine Republican battles. They will continue, entangling Congress and stymieing national politics in the process. Politics is a team sport that requires captains, congressional politics, even more so. Today’s congressional Republicans are not a team; they have no captain and they have displayed their failings for all the world to see.

Bolsonaro followers are ransacking the presidential palace, the congress and the Supreme Court today. He is ensconced at Mar-a-lago with Trump right now: Who says America isn’t still an inspiration to the world? This WaPo article from November is pertinent: Brazilian congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son, has visited Florida since the Oct. 30 vote, meeting Trump at Mar-a-Lago and strategizing with other political allies by phone. He spoke with former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who was in Arizona assisting the campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, about the power of the pro-Bolsonaro protests and potential challenges to the Brazilian election results, Bannon said. He lunched in South Florida with former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller, now CEO of the social media company Gettr, and discussed online censorship and free speech, Miller said. Neither Trump nor Eduardo Bolsonaro responded to requests for comment. Those conversations have mirrored debates unfolding in Brasília, where Bolsonaro’s supporters are discussingnext steps for his populist conservative movement.

Just think about that for a moment. First of all, he’s talking about the thing he says nobody should talk about. Then he says he brought in professors to tell him what we have known since the dawn of the nuclear age, but fails to tell them that he was really looking for permission to launch a first strike if he wanted to. (That’s surely the reason why they all wove a lurid story of Armageddon.) Then this rambling moron says Biden has lost his mind and lies about what he said about Ukraine by putting his own words in Biden’s mouth. This is a reminder you probably don’t really need but I put it here because we just saw the House GOP majority, including the new speaker, ostentatiously lick his boots over the weekend giving him credit for finally securing McCarthy’s win. He’s not done yet.

The new Republican Congress has an agenda: revenge. Because it is who they are, they are going after the president’s son. Richard Painter, the law professor and former White House ethic lawyer tweets, “News flash: Hunter Biden is not president, does not work for the U.S. government, and does not appear to have any influence on the U.S. government.” No matter. The GOP’s idea of doing the people’s work is to distract attention from their own moral turpitude and to exact retribution for Democrats’ efforts to hold Trump accountable for malfeasance in office. They mean to get under Uncle Joe Biden’s skin by attacking his son (The Guardian, emphasis mine): “The right wing is licking its chops at the chance to go after him,” said Joshua Kendall, author of First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama. “The level of venom is going to be over the top and really, really dirty. The Republicans’ rhetoric might get so heated that it detracts from some of the actual behaviour.” Republicans have been waiting a long time for this moment.

News overlooked on Friday This news was largely obscured Friday by the Republicans’ Speaker follies: The special counsel investigating Donald Trump could decide whether to file criminal charges against him in just weeks after amassing a trove of new state documents concerning pressure to overturn the 2020 election, sources have told Bloomberg. Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of Justice Department prosecutors are currently poring over new emails, letters and other records from battleground states. “You can tell that it’s moving quickly,” Brian Kidd, a former federal prosecutor who served under Smith at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg. Officials in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico and Nevada confirmed to Bloomberg that they have complied with grand jury subpoenas from Smith’s office. The material turned over by Nevada and reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that Trump representatives baselessly accused the state’s local officials of allowing election “fraud and abuse” soon after Trump lost the vote to Joe Biden. “Moving quickly” is good.

In my latest article I look at the growing evidence that the US strategy in Ukraine may be aimed not only at weakening Russia — but Germany as well. While last week I looked at the UK’s mini-budget hysteria, and why the the government’s plan wasn’t attacked because of the tax cuts (which were bad) but because …

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I’ve got a new piece up at Compact about the shocking facts that recent lawsuits and FOIAs are bringing to light about the extent of the collaboration between the US government and Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to police so-called disinformation. What’s apparent is that the aim of this strategy wasn’t to …

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