Not to sound like an old Carson joke setup, but…. It is a mystery just how much of their own BS the hardest right among the Republican House caucus believes. They really, really dislike their own party establishment. That’s something activists on both sides of the aisle can appreciate. What they do about it is something else. Especially with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is now backing Rep. Kevin McCarthy in his failing bid for Speaker. McCarthy failed to secure the votes to win three times on Tuesday. There is more fun to come this afternoon. CNN’s Jake Tapper offered some praise for Greene’s willingness to back the majority of her caucus, while contributor Jonah Goldberg condemned the holdouts (Mediaite): “They’re nihilists,” he said before ripping Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a leading anti-McCarthy voice. “Most of these guys are performative people. Matt Gaetz is an illiterate.” Dana Bash asked Goldberg if the speakership drama speaks to a broader problem with the Republican Party.
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With no room at the pediatric ICU, or no pediatric ICU A friend is a retired neonatal ICU doctor. It’s a tough gig watching premies struggle for life. Even tougher when she lost one. Tougher still for the parents. Alexander Stockton and Lucy King produced a video diary for the New York Times about how COVID, RSV and flu are hitting young kids especially hard this winter. My connection to RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) is modest but memorable. So when it pops up in the news I notice. This year it’s a tripledemic (Yale Medicine): “What we are seeing is record levels of RSV in young children. Usually, we see a spike in December or January, but it’s earlier this year,” says Scott Roberts, MD, a Yale Medicine infectious diseases specialist. Meanwhile, as of early December, RSV cases reported by Yale were beginning to go down and COVID-19 and flu cases were increasing. A big part of the flu increase, he explains, is our lack of immunity from having not been exposed to the virus for several seasons due to masking and other precautions, many of which have fallen to the wayside.
If anyone still labors under the impression that Donald Trump invented the shitshow that is the modern Republican Party, Tuesday’s performance on Capitol Hill will have disabused them of that notion. It was déjà vu all over again, just like in 2015 when Kevin McCarthy was humiliated by far right bomb-throwers simply because he was so easy to humiliate, thus giving them leverage and pleasure in equal measure. Poor McCarthy spent the next seven years groveling and genuflecting to these extremists under the foolish impression that they would reward him for his fealty. As Salon’s Rae Hodge lays out in detail, on Tuesday afternoon they simply laughed in his face and humiliated him again. Back in 2015, the newly formed Freedom Caucus, born out of the Tea Party class that came into Congress five years before in the 2010 “shellacking,” managed to force then-Speaker John Boehner to resign for having the temerity to make deals with the Democrats in the Senate and the White House in order to keep the government functioning.
Owning the libs is all that matters As we watch the unfolding dumpster fire in Washington, keep in mind that this is what these people are doing to their own constituents. There is no good reason for this other than a deep and abiding belief that they must kill people rather than have the government help pay for their health insurance. This is who they are: Mississippi’s health-care crisis is worsening, and an overhaul of the state’s “current system of care is unmistakably essential,” a leading medical group warned hours before the State Legislature was set to begin its 2023 session at noon Monday. “The lack of access to healthcare for many Mississippians is currently a crisis, not a new crisis, but one that has been fermenting—and is getting worse,” the Mississippi State Medical Association said in a press release this morning. “As hospitals close across Mississippi, access to life-saving medical care becomes a real threat to all Mississippi.
Lol… I’m sure he’s relieved that he isn’t the center of attention today.
The descent of MAGA into chaos continues Charlie Sykes: By the end of what promises to be a very long day Kevin McCarthy will either (1) be narrowly elected with the votes of fabulist and accused felon George Santos, conspiracist MTG, and a handful of dissidents who hate his guts, or (2) he’s going to have to move his stuff out of the Speaker’s Office a day after prematurely moving it in. Time after time, the man who would be speaker tried to shrink himself into the office, and is ending his bid by offering multiple concessions to the bomb-throwers in the caucus who will hold him hostage if he survives. Even Newt Gingrich is alarmed by the shambles. “The precedent that sets is … any five people can get up and say, ‘Well, I’m now going to screw up the conference, too.’ The choice is Kevin McCarthy or chaos.” But it’s chaos either way, isn’t it? McCarthy is a hollow man and a weak leader, and his caucus is now in the process of testing just how weak he is. One of the most powerful speakers in House history is about to be replaced by one of the puniest.
I thought I would share this piece about Jim Jordan from 2016 just in case anyone forgets that this House circus started long before they invited their superstar clown Donald Trump into the tent: Jordan won his House seat in 2006, the year Democrats took the majority, but he didn’t emerge as a force until five years later. Republicans reclaimed the House and elected him to lead the Republican Study Committee, a powerful faction within the GOP Conference focused on crafting policy. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) remembers turning to Ryan at the time and asking who he should vote for. “Jim Jordan, of course!” Ryan responded, according to Gowdy. Jordan that year also befriended a bunch of firebrand freshmen who rode the 2010 tea party wave to Washington but didn’t quite fit in with their establishment colleagues. They admired Jordan for his conservative purity and they quickly formed an alliance. Within six months atop the study committee, Jordan began to divide the Republican Conference.
Not bloody likely This strikes me as hilarious: OPPONENTS OF Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the House speakership are digging in after a tense discussion on the House floor between Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. The pair’s conspicuous exchange in the back of the chamber on the first day of the 118th Congress was caught on C-SPAN — and noted by many members in the building. Thanks to Gaetz and his far-right allies, McCarthy, a California Republican, failed to win the speakership on the first round of voting. Gaetz told Ocasio-Cortez that McCarthy has been telling Republicans that he’ll be able to cut a deal with Democrats to vote present, enabling him to win a majority of those present and voting, according to Ocasio-Cortez. She told Gaetz that wasn’t happening, and also double-checked with Democratic party leadership, confirming there’d be no side deal. “McCarthy was suggesting he could get Dems to walk away to lower his threshold,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept of her conversation with Gaetz on McCarthy’s failed ploy.
This time the insurrection will be coming from inside the House — and they’ll be armed: The incoming Republican majority in the House of Representatives removed metal detectors outside of the chamber floor on Tuesday, just three days before the second anniversary of the deadly Jan. 6 riot. Why it matters: The magnetometers were installed outside the House chamber in January 2021 to beef up security after the attack, but some Republicans have vocally opposed the increased security checks. Eight Republicans and one Democrat were fined thousands of dollars for not passing through magnetometers required to enter the House chamber, the New York Times reported in 2021. Driving the news: A rules package for the new Congress removes “Democrat fines for failure of Members to comply with unscientific mask mandates and security screenings before entering the House floor,” Republicans on the House Rules Committee said. “Members should not face unnecessary disruptions as they carry out their constitutional duties,” they added.
A brief look back… The biggest philosophical news item of 2022, by far, as indicated by Daily Nous statistics, was the discovery of five crates of long-forgotten transcriptions of Hegel lectures in the archives of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising. A bit lower on the list, though still in the top 50, was the placing online of a large selection of Quine’s correspondence. But lest you think it is just the past that philosophers get excited about, one of the other big topics in 2022 concerned large language models like GPT-3 and their use by students and researchers, as well as other developments in AI. “Philosophers On GPT-3,” published two and a half years ago, continued to see a lot of traffic, and was joined by other posts published this year: “Talking Philosophy with ChatGPT“, “Conversation Starter: Teaching Philosophy in an Age of Large Language Models“, “If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them: GPT-3 Edition“, “Two Cultures of Philosophy: AI Edition“, “We’re Not Ready for the AI on the Horizon, But People Are Trying,” and “Philosophy, AI, and Society Listserv“.