Newtie’s spawn take the wheel and he doesn’t like it Did he think that when he enabled the extreme right wing, playing to their basest instincts, that it would never blow back on him? Has he ever read the Bible? Shakespeare? History? Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich attacked Republicans who are opposing Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s, R-Calif., bid for speaker Monday. Gingrich launched the salvo against McCarthy’s opponents during a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, saying the vote threatens to throw the GOP into “chaos.” He argued that the small group of hard line lawmakers don’t have the “moral right” to oppose the will of the overwhelming majority of Republicans who do support McCarthy for speaker. “I don’t understand what they’re doing. They’re not voting against Kevin McCarthy, they’re voting against over 215 members of their own conference. Their conference voted overwhelmingly, 85%, for McCarthy to be speaker, so this is a fight between a handful of people and the entire rest of the conference,” Gingrich said.
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from Lars Syll • Mind the assumptions — assess uncertainty and sensitivity. • Mind the hubris — complexity can be the enemy of relevance. • Mind the framing — match purpose and context. • Mind the consequences — quantification may backfire. • Mind the unknowns — acknowledge ignorance. Andrea Saltelli, John Kay, Deborah Mayo, Philip […]
Something is seriously broken Two items this morning should be clues to how around the bend and down the rabbit hole this country has traveled in recent years. Brian Klaas (subscription req’d) posts about the lack of basic standards for elected officials. Looking at you, George Santos: Much of the modern world has created what I call the broken pyramid of scrutiny. In principle, levels of scrutiny and accountability should increase as the potential to do catastrophic harm increases. The higher up the hierarchy you go, the more that you should be monitored to make sure that you’re not going to destroy the company, or bring down the government, from your perch at the top. The least powerful should face the least scrutiny; the most powerful the most oversight. Instead, as I wrote in “Corruptible,” we do the opposite. Santos would have been exposed as a fraud before being offered “any run-of-the-mill government job.” But not in Congress. Klass contrasts the training he had to go to volunteer as a tour guide at an English historical site: In my spare time, I volunteer as a tour guide at a historic site in England.
Brace for new GOP efforts to stop younger Americans from voting The Financial Times offers data showing how the Great Recession reset how Millennials view the world. Something odd appears to be overturning an old paradigm about political views and aging. Unlike the generational cohorts before them, they are not getting more conservative with age. “The shift has striking implications for the UK’s Conservatives and US Republicans, who can no longer simply rely on their base being replenished as the years pass,” writes John Burn-Murdoch. “[C]oncepts from public health analytics” suggest the old predictions do not apply to Millennials: Let’s start with age effects, and the oldest rule in politics: people become more conservative with age. If millennials’ liberal inclinations are merely a result of this age effect, then at age 35 they too should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.
Once again, thank you so, so much for your support this year. I am genuinely overwhelmed. The readers of this blog are the nicest people in the world and I could not be more grateful. Here’s hoping that this next year brings us some peace and stability. I always wish that every year. But even if it doesn’t, we’ll be here documenting, analyzing and synthesizing the news as we see it. Tom, Dennis, tristero, spocko, Batocchio and I look forward to delivering it to you every day of the week as we’ve been doing for the past 20 years. To all that we lost and all that we gained in the past year, and to all that’s to come in the days ahead…cheers! — digby
Apparently, he’s staying at Mar-a-Lago. How perfect. What’s a MAGA man to do after losing an election? Emulating President Trump, Brazil’s outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, plans to skip his successor’s inauguration ceremony and travel instead to — where else — Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Bolsonaro will avoid handing over the official presidential sash to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at an inauguration ceremony at Brasilia on Sunday. Instead, the October election loser will fly this weekend to Florida for a visit with Mr. Trump at the famed Palm Beach resort, several Brazilian press outlets report. On Tuesday, the official Brazilian government website published a statement saying that the Office of Institutional Security has confirmed that the security team for Mr. Bolsonaro’s family will be “on a trip to Miami, Florida,” next week. “Bolsonaro will not be in Brazil for the inauguration ceremony,” a professor of international relations at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Regiane Nitsch Bressan, told the Sun.
He seems preoccupied with Ukraine and Russia What are your hopes for the American people in 2023, Mr President? “Peace. We never should have been involved with a certain war that’s taking place that’s hurting a lot of people, killing a lot of people, hurting a lot of countries and hopefully that will be straightened out very quickly with Ukraine and Russia …” Interesting that he leads with that. And after dodging questions about DeSantis and abortion he blathers about the border and inflation and then makes this very adamant statement at the end “We have to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine…” I think we can see the outlines of his campaign coming into focus. It shouldn’t be a surprise considering his base’s views on these issues. Of course he’s going to rant and rave about the border and demagogue inflation to death, But it’s clear that he’s going to come out solidly against NATO and demand withdrawal of support for Ukraine in support of Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression.
There was good reason to think the Republicans would do well in the 2022 midterms based on the historical precedents. The out party gains, the economy was shit, the president was unpopular yadd, yadda, yadda. But something else went on in 2022 that should make the media take a long hard look at how they cover campaigns and polling. The NY Times did a deep dive into what happened and it is clear that the Republican polling outfits played a media that was far to eager to buy what they were selling. They love to see the Democrats give a good spanking by Republicans. In fact, it’s their favorite thing, even if some of them are Democrats themselves. An excerpt: In the election’s immediate aftermath, the polling failures appeared to be in keeping with misfires in 2016 and 2020, when the strength of Donald J. Trump’s support was widely underestimated, and with the continuing struggles of an industry that arose with the corded home telephone to adapt to the mass migration to cellphones and text messaging.
Politico has some highlights of the January 6th transcripts that we didn’t hear about in the hearings. Good lord: Yeah … It’s almost too much disgusting, immoral, illegal behavior in one place. What are they going to do with all this stuff?
If you are an American and you haven’t already voted in the 2022 mid-term elections, please get out and vote tomorrow. Now, more than ever, we need to vote for politicians and parties who will bring down emissions, set aside land for reforestation, and adapt to existing temperature rise. We can do this, but we … Continue reading Vote to Fight Climate Change