Dreamy Paul Ryan has some thoughts about Donald Trump The Guardian has a write up on his comments on a podcast from last month that’s only now making the rounds. He doesn’t say anything we all didn’t already know but it might mean something to a few swing voters who remember him as a normal Republican: Ryan, from Wisconsin, left Congress in 2019 and now sits on the board of Fox Corp, parent company of Fox News. He was speaking to Kevin Kajiwara, co-president of Teneo Political Risk Advisory, in a podcast interview recorded in November but widely noticed this week. Voices on both sides of the main political aisle have criticised Ryan for not strongly opposing Trump when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2016, or through four chaotic years in the White House that ended in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress. When stepping down Ryan praised Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, widely blamed for increasing inequality and the national deficit, as one of his biggest achievements along with increasing defense spending.
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They sneaked it into the defense bill The Hill reports: Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress. The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden. The provision underscores Congress’s commitment to the NATO alliance that was a target of former President Trump’s ire during his term in office. The alliance has taken on revitalized importance under Biden, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “NATO has held strong in response to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said in a statement. He added the legislation “reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security.
It’s overrun by horrible people and the bots that impersonate them The First lady shared this innocuous Christmas video and then all hell broke loose: Here’s a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with Xitter. First look at this fun White House Christmas video shared by the First Lady: So what’s the problem? Well: They seem nice, don’t they? It goes on like that for days. I think Amanda Marcotte nailed it. It’s obvious: I know! It’s tap-dancing, it’s not pole dancing fergawdsakes. And the choeography dancing through the White House was impressive! But yeah, some of the dancers are black and some are gay. And they are (apparently) too exuberant which means they don’t know their place. It’s pretty clear what these critics are upset about. Honestly, there is nothing these homophobic racist jerks won’t whine about. Nothing… It’s Happy Hollandaise time, folks. If you’d like to participate, you can do so below. 🙂
Driving America into the ditch Donors were peeved over the bad publicity. In a House hearing on campus antisemitism last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) demanded university presidents from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT answer for antisemitic campus protests over the war in Gaza. Asked whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate codes of conduct, amount to bullying and harassment, and prompt expulsions, the administrators hedged. A video extract went viral. Michelle Goldberg responded, “If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing … I might have felt the same way.” The administrators “acquitted themselves poorly.” “But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable,” Goldberg added. “In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.” But the trap was sprung. Over the weekend and under pressure from university donors, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and board chair Scott L.
Follow the data Take good news where you find it. Politico: Special counsel Jack Smith has extracted data from the cell phone Donald Trump used while in the White House and plans to present evidence of his findings to a Washington, D.C. jury to demonstrate how Trump used the phone in the weeks during which he attempted to subvert the 2020 election. In a court filing Monday, Smith indicated that he plans to call an expert witness who extracted and reviewed data copied from Trump’s phone, as well as a phone used by another unidentified individual in Trump’s orbit. The data from Trump’s phone could reveal day-to-day details of his final weeks in office, including his daily movements, his Twitter habits and any other aides who had access to his accounts and devices. The data, for example, could help show whether Trump personally approved or sent a fateful tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Today is the day the MAGA House plans to officially vote for an “impeachment inquiry” I know this will come as quite a shock, but the current U.S. Congress is the least productive congress in almost a hundred years. Not since the first years of the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover has the legislative branch been so ineffectual. This may seem surprising considering that the Republican majority has dominated the news from the moment it took the oath last January, but it has barely managed to do the one thing it’s supposed to do which is pass legislation. They certainly have been busy though. They started with an epic battle for the Speaker’s office that ended even before the year was up with the dramatic defenestration of that same Speaker for committing the cardinal sin of compromising with the Democratic Senate and White House to keep the government running. That took weeks of effort leaving little time for anything else. Then they had to hold “oversight” hearings to yell at administration figures and provoke fights with witnesses and there was the huge issue of the Senate dress code.
He’s right there. Why won’t they talk to him in public? Hunter Biden wants a public hearing for good reason! The Democrats are backing him: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., backed that call for a public hearing while speaking to reporters on Wednesday. She was one of multiple Democratic lawmakers to address Republicans’ impeachment inquiry of Biden, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who described in the investigation as “more like a what-is-it, not a whodunnit.” “I won’t even call it an investigation, I’ll call it an exercise in futility,” Ocasio-Cortez said about the Hunter Biden investigation, describing it as “groundless and unsubstantiated.” The New York congresswoman said there is more pressing business than Hunter Biden. “We need to do far more than worry about baseless investigations that are conducted more on podcasts than, frankly, on a grounding of evidence,” she said. Aaaaand, needless to say, Republicans are having a hissy fit: Lol. Here’s how that ended: Hunter Biden did the right thing.
An election year like no other If you hadn’t already had your mind blown by what these authoritarian MAGA monsters are capable of, all you had to do was observe the grotesque display that the Texas government put on this week. The despicable cruelty they dispensed upon a woman and her family enduring one of the worst crises of her life says it all. They didn’t care that she was carrying a fetus with anomalies so extreme that it would probably be stillborn or live for a very short time if it were brought to term. There was no hope. Nor did they care that her pregnancy was risky and dangerous to her and her ability to have more children in the future. Instead, they demanded that she endure the full length of that pregnancy anyway, no matter the price she and her family would have to pay and go through childbirth all in order to appease fundamentalist demands that essentially define pregnant women as incubators and nothing more. She finally had to flee to a civilized place that recognized her as a human being. This issue is not going away.
I suspect you haven’t heard about this. The only hysterical headlines are the ones that show Biden losing. Ok, so what about those battleground states everyone was shrieking about the other day based on one poll? Oh. And then there’s this: This is good too: I’m not saying these things mean any more than anything else going into the election year. We don’t know what is really going to motivate people next November. But there’s no reason to discount them either. Let’s just say that there is a lot of information out there and there’s no reason to fall into a doom spiral just because the media likes to play up the negative Biden stories. It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! If you’ve of a mind…
I am offering this thoughtful piece on the sexual violence of October 7th by Jill Filipovic with a gift link because I really want you to be able to read the whole thing. There’s so much sturm und drang around this topic that it’s hard to ever find clarity. This is one of the rare articles that provides it without pandering, excusing or obfuscating the reality. She discusses in detail how difficult it was to get reliable forensic evidence in the aftermath of the attack and explains why it was important, as a journalist, to wait for the facts. Reporting of sexual violence is war is always fraught and with all discussions of rape it’s important to be precise because so often the reflexive response is to dismiss it. But that’s not the whole story here: But soon after the attacks, the evidence started to come in, and it took the form that evidence of wartime rape often does: accounts from survivors of the attacks, emergency responders, medical personnel, those who examined the bodies and journalists who were permitted to see some attack footage.