The GOP agenda is something else Oh, and also they need to get to the bottom of the pandemic origins and figure out why kids were kept out of schools. This is just a friendly reminder of the circus that’s raising its tent in Washington DC next week. RICH EDSON, FOX NEWS: Congressman, there is a speakership race coming up in less than a week. Who is going to be Speaker? REP. ANDY BIGGS: We will have to have that vote on January 3. Right now, nobody has 218 votes which is the magic number. I don’t we are going to see that until January 3. Maybe it will take a few ballots to shake that out. EDSON: Is there a candidate you would support or that you want or think should be Speaker of the House? BIGGS: Of course, I’m running. But there are some good people in our conference. I don’t want to put a name. I don’t want to put a target on their back, but there are several people that are very capable, actually more than just a few capable of being Speaker of the House. I think we will get a consensus candidate, and we will get it in fairly short order and move on.
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It’s not just Twitter, it’s Tesla too Paul Krugman addresses one of the big questions I think a lot of us have had over the past few weeks. If that guy is running twitter isn’t that guy also running Tesla? How much of his reputation is hype? If you’re one of those people who bought Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency near its peak last fall, you’ve lost a lot of money. Is it any consolation to know that you would have lost a similar amount if you had bought Tesla stock instead? OK, probably not. Still, Tesla stock’s plunge is an opportunity to talk about what makes businesses successful in the information age. And in the end, Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think. It’s natural to attribute Tesla’s recent decline — which is, to be sure, part of a general fall in tech stocks, but an exceptionally steep example — to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed. Indeed, given what we’ve seen of Musk’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust him to feed my cat, let alone run a major corporation.
Helen Branswell of STAT News, one of the best science writers around, interviewed a whole bunch of scientists and public health experts about what surprised them about the COVID pandemic. It’s fascinating. Some of them were surprised by things like the supply chain breakdown or the eerie quiet of the streets during the early days. With others it was the virus itself. You need to read the whole thing, but I’ve excerpted a few of the findings below: The biggest surprise, hands down: How the virus has evolved In the early days of the pandemic, before the new virus had a name, people who had studied coronaviruses offered reassuring predictions about the stability of the virus, which has implications for how often people might be reinfected and how frequently vaccines would need to be updated. Coronaviruses don’t change very quickly, they aren’t as mutable as, say, influenza viruses, those experts said. In fact, the spike protein on the virus’ exterior, the one that attaches to human cells and triggers infection, cannot change too much without losing its ability to infect, they assured the rest of us. That was the dogma.
George Santos is evidence Congressman-Elect George Santos, scheduled to be sworn into Congress in days, is under investigation by a New York prosecutor (NBC News): “The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-Elect Santos are nothing short of stunning. The residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly said in a statement about her fellow Republican on Wednesday. “No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.” Santos, who made history last month as the first openly LGBTQ non-incumbent Republican to be elected to Congress, was the subject of a bombshell investigation The New York Times published this month, which found much of Santos’ background appeared to have been manufactured, including claims that he had worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and had graduated from Baruch College. Daily Beast has reporting on the mysterious source of the $700k Santos lent his campaign from his Devolder Organization.
Piston-powered drones fly ahead of cruise missiles It took a lot of chutzpah for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to issue an ultimatum to Ukraine late Monday: “The point is simple: fulfil [Russian demands] for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army.” That’s rich, especially considering The Washington Post’s lead story this morning, headlined, Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war. It is not that Russia does not still maintain the capacity to inflict damage on Ukraine, the way stinging insects raise painful welts. But Lavrov’s boast about the Russian army appears to be just that. The Kremlin’s troops are badly depleted. Conscripts are fleeing the country. So much so that a Kazakh chocolate company created a pointed ad about it. When Moscow diverted troops south to defend the Russian-held regional capital of Kherson, Ukraine advanced toward and retook Kharkiv: In early September, Ukrainian forces would steamroll across hundreds of square miles, routing the Russians and surprising themselves.
But the Durham probe goes on… It was just another expensive pacifier for the big baby. Steve Benen reports: For those who might benefit from a refresher — you’d be forgiven for thinking, “John Durham’s name sounds familiar, but I can’t remember why I’m supposed to care about him” — let’s revisit our earlier coverage and explain how we arrived at this point. The original investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal, led by then-special counsel Robert Mueller, led to a series of striking findings: The former president’s political operation in 2016 sought, embraced, capitalized on, and lied about Russian assistance — and then took steps to obstruct the investigation into the foreign interference. The Trump White House wasn’t pleased with the conclusions, but the Justice Department’s inspector general conducted a lengthy probe of the Mueller investigation, and not surprisingly, the IG’s office found nothing improper. This, of course, only outraged Trump further, so then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped a federal prosecutor — U.S.
Here’s a fun look at some delicious MAGA on MAGA combat: Sean Hannity, once the most important mouthpiece for Donald Trump, seems to be increasingly on the MAGAworld outs. And a new revelation that Hannity doesn’t buy the Big Lie isn’t helping. In a just-released deposition surrounding Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit, the Fox News star said he’d never believed—not “for one second”—baseless election fraud claims stemming from the 2020 election. That stance, directly at odds with many of his primetime segments and the beliefs of many of his closest allies, has put Hannity in an awkward position. Among the MAGA all-stars currently upset with Hannity are MyPillow maven Mike Lindell, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, far-right radio host Stew Peters, and even reportedly Trump himself. […] “Sean Hannity is disgusting,” Lindell told The Daily Beast.
Thanks to the efforts of Environmental Justice Australia (EJA) and the Environment Council of Central Queensland (EcoCeQ,), Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek reopened the environmental assessment process for 16 coal mines and two gas projects that had previously been approved. To take part, it was necessary to submit new information not available at the time of […]
And did environmentalists kill the last one? There has been a lot of talk lately about a revival of nuclear power, partly in response to the need to replace the energy previously supplied by Russia, and partly as a longer-term response to climate change. To the extent that this means avoiding premature closure of operational […]
My latest piece from Independent Australia, on my Substack