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Republicans are underwater A lot of polling these days is crap. Presidential horse-race polls, especially. That doesn’t keep them from drawing eyeballs like Bat Boy pics at the checkout counter. Morning Consult has another this morning sure to provoke anxiety. Trump leads Biden in key swing states, per our survey with @business: AZBiden: 43%Trump: 47% GABiden: 43%Trump: 48% MIBiden: 44%Trump: 44% NVBiden: 46%Trump: 43% NCBiden: 43%Trump: 47% PABiden: 45%Trump: 46% WIBiden: 44%Trump: 46%https://t.co/ht2f2Sk2Wq pic.twitter.com/kAceURs9fv — Morning Consult (@MorningConsult) October 19, 2023 But so does Navigator. While presidential polling a full year out from November 2024 suggests another close election, Navigator reports the Republican brand is suffering: From the newsletter: Seven in ten Americans disapprove of the way Republicans in Congress are handling their jobs, as favorability for prominent Republicans is underwater. For the first time, Republicans hold a net negative view of Republicans in Congress (net -4; 45 percent approve – 49 percent disapprove; a net negative 23-point shift since early September).

Fox News' John Roberts: If Democrats were in the majority, how long would it take Hakeem Jeffries to get to 218 votes? Jason Chaffetz: "Well, Hakeem Jeffries has now lost 17 races in a row. So 17 times in a row, he's been put up for Speaker and he's lost." pic.twitter.com/a6xlkCd7sp — Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 19, 2023 It’ doesn’t get any more asinine than that. Oh wait: Scott: Democrats knew what they were doing when they took McCarthy out of the Speakership Keilar: They didn’t take him out. Scott: Sure they did Keilar: You guys are in the majority. pic.twitter.com/lR71iYbSzQ — Acyn (@Acyn) October 18, 2023

This is what happens when the monster you created turns on you: In the closed-door meeting, several GOP members urged Rep. Jim Jordan to drop his bid for the speakership, but he is resisting those calls, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Jordan, who sources say scrapped a third vote today after failing to get enough to win the speakership in his first two ballots, is is now leaning toward backing a resolution to expand interim Speaker Patrick McHenry’s powers, sources said, but he wants to see how today’s House GOP conference meeting goes.  Here’s how it went: A closed-door meeting of the House GOP Conference turned heated today, multiple sources tell CNN, a further sign of chaos as Republicans struggle to elect a speaker.  At one point, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who led the effort to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker, was told to sit down by McCarthy but refused.

He was once the wingnuttiest of wingnuts. Now he’s the establishment. Did he change or did the party? A little bit of both: You’re going to read that the 18-year House veteran is the “adult in the room” compared to other GOP hard-liners — a pragmatist who’s ready to govern and even has Democrats clamoring for him to run the House. But it wasn’t always that way. Part of the reason the North Carolina Republican has any lingering cred with the far right — though it’s fading in the Matt Gaetz era — is that he used to be one of them, even before the rise of the GOP tea party movement. McHenry entered Congress in 2005 at 29 and soon made his name as a self-described “bomb-thrower.” He rose through the House GOP ranks by attacking the government’s economic rescue plans in the wake of the global financial crisis, helping sink the Bush administration’s initial attempt to bail out Wall Street — a failed vote that triggered a market crash.

That explosion at the hospital in Gaza has inspired a contentious debate about who is responsible and I don’t think people are going to be persuaded either way if it violates their priors. However, I think that spending too much time pointing fingers on that single incident is really counterproductive for both Israeli people and Palestinian people caught in the crossfire. There is much more at stake. Here’s Eric Levitz at NY Magazine: An explosive fell on the parking lot of a hospital in Gaza City Tuesday, killing a large number of Palestinians. Hamas attributed the blast to the Israeli military. Many news organizations and critics of Israel attributed the catastrophe to the Israeli military. This presumption of Israeli responsibility was not unfounded. Israel had struck the hospital just days earlier, according to video footage obtained by the New York Times. The Israeli military had ordered the evacuation of 22 hospitals in northern Gaza last week, according to the World Health Organization. And Israel had dropped more than 6,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s attack on October 7.

If you want to know why half the people in his own party don’t trust him, this is it Philip Bump on Jim Jordan: Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) had a job to do Wednesday afternoon, and darned if he wasn’t going to do it. Cole joined the lengthy roster of Republican representatives given the opportunity to nominate their party’s candidate for speaker before a vote in the House — a roster on which he might admittedly already appear, given that the Republican conference is well into the double digits on such nominations this year. But given that task, his job was to convince the House broadly, his colleagues specifically and the viewing audience potentially of the preparedness of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for the job. With that goal in mind, he at one point in his speech hailed the House Judiciary Committee chairman’s moral fortitude. “He is a person of absolute personal integrity,” Cole said of Jordan. “I’ve never once had to question something that he told me. He’s an honorable man.” This is a more important testimonial than it might seem.

I’ve got a new piece up at UnHerd about the unprecedented wave of violence and gang warfare currently engulfing Haiti. In the article I explain that the current situation can only be understood in the context of more than a century of disastrous neocolonial interventions — mostly by the US, and more recently by the UN.

I’ve written for UnHerd about Africa’s revolt against Western-dictated Net Zero policies, and how these threaten to lock the world’s poorest countries into perpetual underdevelopment.

I’ve got a few new articles out in the usual mags. Over at UnHerd I’ve written about Donald Tusk’s victory in Sunday’s Polish elections and its momentous consequences — for Poland, the EU and NATO. Long story short: it’s clearly a big win for pro-EU forces, but attempts to use the result to justify a new integrationist power …

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No, Kevin, Republicans did this Please append this to Digby’s Tuesday post, The Most Fatuous Spin In World History. Former speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) spun like a top yesterday after Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) lost his first vote for Speaker of the House by 20 Republican votes one week after Republicans gave McCarthy the boot and stopped the House cold amidst an international crisis. McCarthy: “Every single Democrat voted to stop one branch of government. They created this mess with eight Republicans. Every single Democrat did this.” McCarthy was referring to the vote last week that ousted him as speaker. Um, Short Attention Span Theater, Kevin. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) reminds Republicans that the reason they, McCarthy, Jordan, and the country are in this mess (and why McCarthy is out of a job) dates from a January vote by Republicans only (here). McCarthy himself set the stage for his ouster by caving to his MAGA lunatics’ demand for a rule change that would allow only one member of Congress to bring a “motion to vacate” and force a vote on removing the speaker. One did. Matt Gaetz did. And here we are.